diskseekd(1)

📦 version 5.6, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💾 diskseekd — the manual page, but make it slay 💾

okay bestie, so this page is for diskseek and diskseekd — the disk seek daemon, aka the little guy that simulates Messy Dos' drive cleaning effect. yes THAT effect. we'll get there. 🧹✨

📌 NOTE (read this first, fr)

This manpage was automatically generated from fdutils's texinfo documentation. And like… the translation process is only approximative, okay? Some items — cross-references, footnotes, indices — just get lost in the translation process. Not a vibe. They genuinely have no appropriate representation in the manpage format.

Also: only the items specific to each command have been translated, and the general info about fdutils got dropped in the manpage version. So I strongly advise you to use the original texinfo doc. 💯

  • To generate a printable copy from the texinfo doc, run:
./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. For real though — in the info version certain examples are difficult to read due to the quoting conventions used in info. it's giving chaos. 🙈

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Okay so here's the lore. Several people noticed that Linux has a bad tendency of killing floppy drives. 😭 These failures remained completely mysterious, until somebody noticed 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. iconic behavior honestly.

diskseekd simulates this effect by seeking the drive periodically. and if it's called as diskseek, the drive is sought only once. one and done, periodt. 💅

✨ 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. the default is the default, bestie 🎀
  • -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. so diskseek is like… one seek, no thoughts, head empty 🌸
  • -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. tragic, honestly. 💀
  2. This section lacks a few smileys. 😭🙈💖

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

  • Fdutils' texinfo doc

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🌈⭐ this was diskseekd(1), from fdutils-5.6, dated 27Jan21 — like, that's the version and the date, they're literally right there in the footer, iykyk. go forth and seek those drives. 🎀💅✨

📦 where this page comes from