I'm trying to put together a script that will burn some data to a cd....is there a way to tell from the command line whether the cd in the drive is a cd-r or a cd-rw? I'd like to blank the cd 1st if it's a cd-rw, but I want to automate this instead of asking for user input.

Thanks!!

eg.

cdrdao disk-info --device ATAPI:1,0,0 2>/dev/null | grep RW| cut -d':' -f 2|tr -d ' '

This pipe would spit out 'yes' is a CD-RW was present and 'no' if you had a CD-R. You just need to modify the cdrdao bit so that it is pointing to the correct SCSI or ATAPI device on your machine. Based on the output of this you can get your script to do the nessesary actions.

OK...the following command:

cdrdao disk-info --device 0,6,0


gave me the following error output:

Cdrdao version 1.1.3 - (C) Andreas Mueller <mueller@daneb.ping.de>
SCSI interface library - (C) Joerg Schilling
L-EC encoding library - (C) Heiko Eissfeldt
Paranoia DAE library - (C) Monty

0,6,0: SONY CD-RW CRX145S Rev: 1.0b
ERROR: No driver found for 'SONY CD-RW CRX145S', available drivers:
cdd2600
generic-mmc
generic-mmc-raw
plextor
plextor-scan
ricoh-mp6200
sony-cdu920
sony-cdu948
taiyo-yuden
teac-cdr55
yamaha-cdr10x
ERROR: Cannot setup device 0,6,0.


I use "cdrecord" to write the cd's so I don't know why there's an error about missing drivers. ???

You do have the driver, it's just clever enough to work out which.
Add --driver generic-mmc

That did the trick. Thanks!!