Name

       diskseek, diskseekd - disk seek daemon; simulates Messy Dos' drive cleaning effect

Note

       This  manpage  has  been  automatically  generated  from  fdutils's texinfo documentation.  However, this
       process is only approximative, and some items, such as cross-references, footnotes and indices  are  lost
       in  this  translation  process.   Indeed,  these  items have no appropriate representation in the manpage
       format.  Moreover, only the items specific  to  each  command  have  been  translated,  and  the  general
       information about fdutils has been dropped in the manpage version.  Thus I strongly advise you to use the
       original texinfo doc.

       *      To generate a printable copy from the texinfo doc, run the following commands:

                     ./configure; make dvi; dvips fdutils.dvi

       *      To generate a HTML copy,  run:

                     ./configure; make html

              A pre-made HTML can be found at: `http://www.tux.org/pub/knaff/fdutils'

       *      To generate an info copy (browsable using emacs' info mode), run:

                     ./configure; make info

       The texinfo doc looks most pretty when printed or as HTML.  Indeed, in the info version certain  examples
       are difficult to read due to the quoting conventions used in info.

Description

       Several  people  have  noticed  that  Linux  has  a bad tendency of killing floppy drives. These failures
       remained completely mysterious, until somebody noticed  that  they  were  due  to  huge  layers  of  dust
       accumulating  in  the  floppy  drives.  This  cannot  happen  under Messy Dos, because this excuse for an
       operating system is so unstable that it crashes roughly every  20  minutes  (actually  less  if  you  are
       running Windows).  When rebooting, the BIOS seeks the drive, and by doing this, it shakes the dust out of
       the drive mechanism. diskseekd simulates this effect by seeking the drive periodically.  If it is  called
       as diskseek, the drive is sought only once.

Options

       The syntax for diskseekd is as follows:

          diskseekd [-d drive] [-i interval] [-p pidfile]

       -d drive
              Selects the drive to seek.  By default, drive 0 (`/dev/fd0') is sought.

       -i interval
              Selects  the  cleaning interval, in seconds.  If the interval is 0, a single seek is done. This is
              useful when calling diskseek from a crontab.  The default is 1000 seconds (about 16  minutes)  for
              diskseekd and 0 for diskseek.

       -p pidfile
              Stores   the   process   id   of  the  diskseekd  daemon  into  pidfile  instead  of  the  default
              `/var/run/diskseekd.pid'.

Bugs

       1.     Other aspects of Messy Dos' flakiness are not simulated.

       2.     This section lacks a few smileys.

See Also

       Fdutils' texinfo doc