diskseekd(1)						      General Commands Manual						      diskseekd(1)

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  rep-
       resentation  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

fdutils-5.5							      03Mar05							      diskseekd(1)