Manual Pages  — FDWRITE

The fdwrite utility will ask the user (on /dev/tty) to insert a new floppy and press return. The device will then be opened, and queried for its parameters, then each track will be formatted, written with data from the inputfile, read back and compared. When the floppy disk is filled, the process is repeated, with the next disk. This continues until the program is interrupted or EOF is encountered on the inputfile.

The options are as follows:

-v
	Toggle verbosity on stdout. Default is ``on''. After device is opened first time the format will be printed. During operation progress will be reported with the number of tracks remaining on the current floppy disk, and the letters I, Z, F, W, R and C, which indicates completion of Input, Zero-fill, Format Write, Read and Compare of current track respectively.
-y
	Do not ask for presence of a floppy disk in the drive. This non-interactive flag is useful for shell scripts.
-f inputfile
	Input file to read. If none is given, stdin is assumed.
-d device
	The name of the floppy device to write to. Default is /dev/fd0.

The fdwrite utility actually closes the device while it waits for the user to press return, it is thus quite possible to use the drive for other purposes at this time and later resume writing with the next floppy.

    tar cf -. | gzip -9 | fdwrite -d /dev/fd0.1720 -v

If a floppy is sick, and the inputfile is seekable, it should ask the user to frisbee the disk, insert another, and rewind to the right spot and continue.

This concept could be extended to cover non-seekable input also by employing a temporary file.

An option (defaulting to zero) should allow the user to ask for retries in case of failure.