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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!cancer.vividnet.com!hunter.premier.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Copying to a floppy drive Date: 9 Sep 1996 13:51:49 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 57 Message-ID: <5117dl$90d@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <3232CD39.7470@sympatico.ca> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Ray Stamp <ray.stamp@sympatico.ca> wrote: > We use a Unix system at work but I know absolutly nothing about the OS. > I am presently reading The first book of Unix but was wondering how to > copy a file from the HD to a floppy ? Unfortunately, the names of the floppy disk drive vary vastly between different Unix versions. Second, there are two basic ways to achieve this. The first is, you create a file system on the floppy, mount it (i.e., join it into the file hierarchy), copy somthing to the part of the filesystem that now belongs to that floppy, and unmount it. For FreeBSD: disklabel -Brw fd0 fd1440 newfs -l1 -i65536 -t0 -u0 /dev/rfd0 mkdir /floppy mount /dev/fd0 /floppy cp some stuff that you like /floppy umount /floppy (The various options to the `newfs' program are explained in the handbook.) The second, and perhaps more popular method is to treat the floppy as a (short) tape device. You don't care for the ability to remove one file or the other from the mid of the archive, but simply dump everything into a single archive on the medium. The most common utility to do something like this is `tar', the `tape archivar': cd /where/to/get/your/files tar -cvf /dev/rfd0 one file or another The archive can be extracted later with `tar -xvf /dev/rfd0'. This method doesn't allow you to handle the files in the archive separately, but it has the advantage that you don't have to high-level format (newfs) or mount the floppy device, and it is believed to be interchangeable with various other Unix dialects, while a file system floppy is only compatible to the same family of Unix. > I am running W95 on my current system and I'm interested in maybe > running a unix os under W95. Is this possible? No. At least, it wouldn't make much sense. > Is there a real basic > freeware version somewhere so I could learn the basics of the OS ? You are asking in a FreeBSD newsgroup, so yes, FreeBSD is freeware. There are also NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, and (somewhat aged already) Minix. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)