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From: carlton@cs.berkeley.edu (Mike Carlton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Ejecting the floppy
Message-ID: <10365@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 21 Jan 91 21:05:45 GMT
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: carlton@cs.berkeley.edu (Mike Carlton)
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 29

Can anyone tell me how to eject a floppy disk under software control?
And how to tell when a new one has been inserted?  

Why do I want to do this?  Well, I'd like to write a 'split' like
program to write files larger than the size of a floppy to a series
of disks (e.g. a compressed tar file of my home directory :-).  

The only way I can see is to use /usr/etc/disk and this is kludgey.  It
should be possible to write a suid script that does '/usr/etc/disk -e
/dev/rfd0a'.  Unfortunately, csh doesn't want to execute my script
(csh: Permission denied) even after I made the owner root and did a
chmod 4555 on the script.  I imagine there's a simple fix I'm
overlooking.  

Even so, using /usr/etc/disk has the problem that the Workspace doesn't
get updated (it leaves the icon of the (no longer present) disk on the
shelf).  Clicking on the disk icon results in a panel asking for the
disk back.

Ideally, I'd guess that it should be possible to message the Workspace
to eject the disk and to prompt for a new one.  Unfortunately, I can't
find any reference on this (I've looked in the 1.0 man pages and
NextAnswers, I don't have the programmer's reference manuals).

Any ideas?  Thanks,

Cheers,
mike
Mike Carlton	carlton@cs.berkeley.edu