UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hiya i did a search for this kind of thing and couldnt find anything!

I have a script that backs up a filesystem at 2 mins past 2 in the morning every morning, the problem, is i now need to progress this so that it checks if there is a tape loaded into the drive, if there is then it will proceed and backup, if not then it will logg an error message saying this to /logs/backupLog

I am still fairly new to unix, i dont fully understand complex scripting but i know basics. So if you have an answer please explain as simply as you can

What i understand is that it needs to check the tape, if theres one loaded it sets a variable to true, if not false, then i can use that variable for if statements and so on.

I cant find anything really helpfull on the net for this so hope you can help.

cheers for the help

Mark

You didn't post your OS and version or the scripting language you are using.

You can try the mt command to check the status of the tape drive. See the man page for mt. Remember to use the norewind option if this tape is used multiple times until it is full.

If that isn't right, then post your OS and version so the correct command can be given.

cheers for the quick reply, sorry for not posting that

i am on solaris 9 and am using ksh for the scripting (if thats right am fairly new to this)

cheers again

Then the mt command should work - check out the man page for status option.

Something like the following is what you are looking for

/usr/bin/mt -f /dev/rmt/Xhbn status

Where X is the tape drive number

You will have to look at the different status that you may get returned - it may come back as /dev/rmt/Xhbn: Device busy as an example. Once you know what to look for, then you can script it

tapestatus=`/usr/bin/mt -f /dev/rmt/Xhbn status`

Note: I don't have a tape drive I can test this on so I leave it up to you - the 'device busy' may not come back on standard out so getting the status may be a little more involved. Also the options /Xhbn - you may not need all of them.

I found an old ksh script that has the following:

/usr/bin/mt -f /dev/rmt/0hbn status
err="$?"
if [ "$err" -ne "0" ] # no tape in drive
then
echo "No tape in drive at `/usr/bin/date '+%H:%M:%S'`." >> message.file
fi

There was more but since this covers what you wanted, I leave it to you to incorporate it.

cheers loads, that worked swell

thanks again

Mark