Finally, after a month of writing, I have hit 100 posts. I remember when I hit 20 posts sometime ago. I have covered C to commands to ports and even to desktop environments. I am also glad that I have had such a great coauthor as Harry is to contribute to the blog as well. He has added numerous useful reviews and bits of information. Insmod, still, however, has not added a single post since he joined me. I look forward to more writing and learning and (with hope) more development of my Unix skills. Maybe some inetd, httpd, and dhclient experiences in the future.................
xatapu
Showing posts with label insmod. Show all posts
Showing posts with label insmod. Show all posts
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Monday, November 13, 2006
Cool packages: bb
bb is a library for creating very advanced ASCII-based graphics. I learned this from insmod. I have also done a bit more research about it, and apparently looks like a demo of the AA library. AA is an "ASCII-art" library, and it is portable to many different platforms. I don't know much about it, so hopefully insmod will get a chance to put something up about it. For more information go to: http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/. This is the library's project page and has lots of info about it. It, of course, also provides a source download and describes the library.
News
Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to post to the blog much this week. I will not have access to the Internet that often. I will try to continue next week.
Friday, November 10, 2006
The mt command
As I told you earlier, just yesterday I discovered the mt command. I know mv, but mt? Well, I then did a man on it. Mt........what the...........magnetic tape control?! I don't believe this! I can control a tape drive from a PC! I can send commands to it! The last time I did this was with a really old Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Hmmm......I might explore this........
Anyway, let's get back to mt. Its syntax is mt [ -f tapename ] command [ count ]. Command and count will be explained shortly. The tape selecting option is -f, which selects the raw tape device. I believe /dev/rmt is the /dev folder for this. There are also a number of operands for mt. Here are some of them from http://bama.ua.edu/cgi-bin/man-cgi?mt+1, a online copy of the UNIX man pages:
count - The number of times that the requested operation is to be performed. By default, mt performs command once. Multiple operations of command may be performed by specifying count.
command - Available commands that can be sent to a magnetic tape drive. Only as many characters as are required to uniquely identify a command need be specified.
eof, weof - Write count EOF marks at the current position on the tape.
fsf - Forward space over count EOF marks. The tape is positioned on the first block of the file.
fsr - Forward space count records.
bsf - Back space over count EOF marks. The tape is positioned on the beginning-of-tape side of the EOF mark.
bsr - Back space count records.
nbsf - Back space count files. The tape is positioned on the first block of the file. This is equivalent to count+1. bsf's followed by one fsf.
asf - Absolute space to count file number. This is equivalent to a rewind followed by a fsf count.
(the next section is from http://www.computerhope.com/unix/umt.htm)
If count is specified with any of the following commands, the count is ignored and the command is performed only once.
eom - Space to the end of recorded media on the tape. This is useful for appending files onto previously written tapes.
rewind - Rewind the tape.
offline, rewoffl - Rewind the tape and, if appropriate, take the drive unit off-line by unloading the tape. It cycles through all four tapes.
status - Print status information about the tape unit.
retension - Rewind the cartridge tape completely, then wind it forward to the end of the reel and back to beginning-of-tape to smooth out tape tension.
reserve - Allow the tape drive to remain reserved after closing the device. The drive must then be explicitly released.
release - Re-establish the default behavior of releasing at close.
forcereserve - Break the reservation of the tape drive held by another host and then reserve the tape drive. This command can be executed only with super-user privileges.
erase - Erase the entire tape. Erasing a tape may take a long time depending on the device and/or tape. Refer to the device specific manual for time details.
Good, but a bit complicated and technical, as far as explanations. I guess an example (for those of you with tape drives out there) might be:
mt erase - erase the tape in the drive found at /dev/rmt0.
mt -f $RMT_NR eof 1 - Mark the end of the tape.
Very cool. Again, these are just probable examples of mt.
For more info, you can go to that man page I mentioned earlier. Another good place for learning about tapes and Unix is http://www.washington.edu/computing/unix/tapes.html. Also you can go to http://www.computerhope.com/unix/umt.htm for more info on use and syntax. That link also provides a link to a page on tcopy, a command I will be discussing soon. Enjoy!
Anyway, let's get back to mt. Its syntax is mt [ -f tapename ] command [ count ]. Command and count will be explained shortly. The tape selecting option is -f, which selects the raw tape device. I believe /dev/rmt is the /dev folder for this. There are also a number of operands for mt. Here are some of them from http://bama.ua.edu/cgi-bin/man-cgi?mt+1, a online copy of the UNIX man pages:
count - The number of times that the requested operation is to be performed. By default, mt performs command once. Multiple operations of command may be performed by specifying count.
command - Available commands that can be sent to a magnetic tape drive. Only as many characters as are required to uniquely identify a command need be specified.
eof, weof - Write count EOF marks at the current position on the tape.
fsf - Forward space over count EOF marks. The tape is positioned on the first block of the file.
fsr - Forward space count records.
bsf - Back space over count EOF marks. The tape is positioned on the beginning-of-tape side of the EOF mark.
bsr - Back space count records.
nbsf - Back space count files. The tape is positioned on the first block of the file. This is equivalent to count+1. bsf's followed by one fsf.
asf - Absolute space to count file number. This is equivalent to a rewind followed by a fsf count.
(the next section is from http://www.computerhope.com/unix/umt.htm)
If count is specified with any of the following commands, the count is ignored and the command is performed only once.
eom - Space to the end of recorded media on the tape. This is useful for appending files onto previously written tapes.
rewind - Rewind the tape.
offline, rewoffl - Rewind the tape and, if appropriate, take the drive unit off-line by unloading the tape. It cycles through all four tapes.
status - Print status information about the tape unit.
retension - Rewind the cartridge tape completely, then wind it forward to the end of the reel and back to beginning-of-tape to smooth out tape tension.
reserve - Allow the tape drive to remain reserved after closing the device. The drive must then be explicitly released.
release - Re-establish the default behavior of releasing at close.
forcereserve - Break the reservation of the tape drive held by another host and then reserve the tape drive. This command can be executed only with super-user privileges.
erase - Erase the entire tape. Erasing a tape may take a long time depending on the device and/or tape. Refer to the device specific manual for time details.
Good, but a bit complicated and technical, as far as explanations. I guess an example (for those of you with tape drives out there) might be:
mt erase - erase the tape in the drive found at /dev/rmt0.
mt -f $RMT_NR eof 1 - Mark the end of the tape.
Very cool. Again, these are just probable examples of mt.
For more info, you can go to that man page I mentioned earlier. Another good place for learning about tapes and Unix is http://www.washington.edu/computing/unix/tapes.html. Also you can go to http://www.computerhope.com/unix/umt.htm for more info on use and syntax. That link also provides a link to a page on tcopy, a command I will be discussing soon. Enjoy!
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Edition 5: Big Changes
Let's see. Already this blog has been updated for four weeks, with nearly 80 posts. We're now on the fifth, beginning this Wednesday, November 8. As for insmod, I am still waiting for a few columns from him. Harry has had some good ones, though. Although my blog has always changed rapidly, there are some large ones today. First, I will not be having particular 'themes' any more asthey are more constrained. Second, I am going to increase publishing and posting. Last week had the lowest on record, with only 11 posts. Third, I will try to dig a bit deeper and maybe get more "reader's responses" now.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Command of the week: tar
Sorry I haven't gotten back to posting in sometimes. Anyway, this week's command is tar. Tar, course, stands for TApe aRchive. It is used to compress files into an archive. Its basic syntax goes like this:
tar file.tar file1 file2 file3
What to me is amazing about tar is its vast expanse of options. You can dump directly to a disk in a drive (-cvfz) and do many other interesting things with tar. For the most part, some basic tar functions are -x, extract, -c, create (new archive), -f, file (set tarfile name), -u, update, -t, which leaves a table of contents, and -r, replace. Here are some examples:
tar -xf /foo/capio.tar /foo
Extract the contents of capio.tar into the folder foo.
tar -cvfz /dev/rfd0a prog1.c newstuff.vi httpd.conf
Tar takes over the floppy drive (in NetBSD in this case) and directly writes the following three files to the floppy. It can be change to burn a CD, though, I think.
Still, this is only a basic tutorial. For more, try this site - http://www.computerhope.com/unix/utar.htm
xatapu
tar file.tar file1 file2 file3
What to me is amazing about tar is its vast expanse of options. You can dump directly to a disk in a drive (-cvfz) and do many other interesting things with tar. For the most part, some basic tar functions are -x, extract, -c, create (new archive), -f, file (set tarfile name), -u, update, -t, which leaves a table of contents, and -r, replace. Here are some examples:
tar -xf /foo/capio.tar /foo
Extract the contents of capio.tar into the folder foo.
tar -cvfz /dev/rfd0a prog1.c newstuff.vi httpd.conf
Tar takes over the floppy drive (in NetBSD in this case) and directly writes the following three files to the floppy. It can be change to burn a CD, though, I think.
Still, this is only a basic tutorial. For more, try this site - http://www.computerhope.com/unix/utar.htm
xatapu
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Blog News
Hello again, this is xatapu. I am here with some news about this blog's plans and status. First off, we have nearly published for two weeks now, with nearly 50 posts. That is great. I feel that I have definitely broken my "one-week-barrier" for how long I am interested in a particular topic I study on my own. Second, I have begun to standardize the categories I make posts about. First, there's "Spotlight", next there is "Command of the week", and so on. I will explain that later. Third, we, the blog authors, plan to make some new "columns". Insmod may write an "Ask insmod" column for Unix help, and I may write a "New digs" column about my new experience with Unix. Lastly, in the future Harry and insmod will make some new posts to the blog.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Edition 2
Oh, yes. Today begins edition 2. Now we have two new authors who contribute to the blog. There were 25 posts in edition one, I believe. There is also one comment. I have a pkgsrc article planned. I am looking forward to more posting and improving the blog with the two other authors, insmod and Harry K.A.
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