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(fdutils.info)diskseekd

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diskseekd
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   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 seeked only once.

Options
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   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
     seeked.

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

  2. This section lacks a few smileys.