1mtools(5)                           MTOOLS                           mtools(5)
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Name

6       mtools.conf - mtools configuration files
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Description

11       This manual page describes the configuration files for mtools. They are
12       called `/etc/mtools.conf' and `~/.mtoolsrc'. If the environmental vari‐
13       able  MTOOLSRC is set, its contents is used as the filename for a third
14       configuration file. These configuration files  describe  the  following
15       items:
16
17       *  Global configuration flags and variables
18
19       *  Per drive flags and variables
20
21   Location of the configuration files
22       `/etc/mtools.conf'   is   the   system-wide   configuration  file,  and
23       `~/.mtoolsrc' is the user's private configuration file.
24
25       On  some  systems,  the  system-wide  configuration  file   is   called
26       `/etc/default/mtools.conf' instead.
27
28     General configuration file syntax
29       The  configuration  files  is  made up of sections. Each section starts
30       with a keyword identifying the section followed by a colon.  Then  fol‐
31       low  variable assignments and flags. Variable assignments take the fol‐
32       lowing form:
33       name=value
34
35       Flags are lone keywords without an equal sign and value following them.
36       A  section either ends at the end of the file or where the next section
37       begins.
38
39       Lines starting with a hash (#) are  comments.  Newline  characters  are
40       equivalent  to whitespace (except where ending a comment). The configu‐
41       ration file is case insensitive, except for  item  enclosed  in  quotes
42       (such as filenames).
43
44   Default values
45       For most platforms, mtools contains reasonable compiled-in defaults for
46       physical floppy drives.  Thus, you usually don't need  to  bother  with
47       the  configuration file, if all you want to do with mtools is to access
48       your floppy drives. On the other hand, the configuration file is needed
49       if  you also want to use mtools to access your hard disk partitions and
50       DOSEMU image files.
51
52   Global variables
53       Global flags may be set to 1 or to 0.
54
55       The following global flags are recognized:
56
57       MTOOLS_SKIP_CHECK
58              If this is set to 1, mtools skips most  of  its  sanity  checks.
59              This  is  needed  to  read some Atari disks which have been made
60              with the earlier ROMs, and which would not be recognized  other‐
61              wise.
62
63       MTOOLS_FAT_COMPATIBILITY
64              If  this  is  set  to  1, mtools skips the fat size checks. Some
65              disks have a bigger FAT than they  really  need  to.  These  are
66              rejected if this option is not set.
67
68       MTOOLS_LOWER_CASE
69              If  this is set to 1, mtools displays all-upper-case short file‐
70              names as lowercase. This has been done to allow a behavior which
71              is  consistent  with  older versions of mtools which didn't know
72              about the case bits.
73
74       MTOOLS_NO_VFAT
75              If this is set to 1, mtools  won't  generate  VFAT  entries  for
76              filenames  which  are  mixed-case, but otherwise legal dos file‐
77              names.  This is useful when  working  with  DOS  versions  which
78              can't grok VFAT long names, such as FreeDOS.
79
80       MTOOLS_DOTTED_DIR
81              In a wide directory, prints the short name with a dot instead of
82              spaces separating the basename and the extension.
83
84       MTOOLS_NAME_NUMERIC_TAIL
85              If this is set to one (default), generate numeric tails for  all
86              long names (~1).  If set to zero, only generate numeric tails if
87              otherwise a clash would have happened.
88
89       MTOOLS_TWENTY_FOUR_HOUR_CLOCK
90              If 1, uses the European notation for  times  (twenty  four  hour
91              clock), else uses the UK/US notation (am/pm)
92
93       MTOOLS_LOCK_TIMEOUT
94              How  long,  in  seconds,  to  wait for a locked device to become
95              free.  Defaults to 30.
96
97       Example: Inserting the following  line  into  your  configuration  file
98       instructs mtools to skip the sanity checks:
99
100            MTOOLS_SKIP_CHECK=1
101
102
103
104       Global variables may also be set via the environment:
105
106            export MTOOLS_SKIP_CHECK=1
107
108
109
110       Global string variables may be set to any value:
111
112       MTOOLS_DATE_STRING
113              The format used for printing dates of files.  By default, is dd-
114              mm-yyyy.
115
116   Per drive flags and variables
117     General information
118       Per drive flags and values may be described in a drive section. A drive
119       section starts with drive "driveletter" :
120
121       Then follow variable-value pairs and flags.
122
123       This is a sample drive description:
124
125            drive a:
126              file="/dev/fd0" use_xdf=1
127
128
129
130     Location information
131       For  each  drive,  you  need  to  describe where its data is physically
132       stored (image file, physical device, partition, offset).
133
134       file   The name of the file or device holding the disk image.  This  is
135              mandatory. The file name should be enclosed in quotes.
136
137       partition
138              Tells  mtools to treat the drive as a partitioned device, and to
139              use the given partition. Only primary partitions are  accessible
140              using  this method, and they are numbered from 1 to 4. For logi‐
141              cal partitions, use the more general offset variable. The parti‐
142              tion  variable  is  intended for removable media such as Syquest
143              disks, ZIP drives, and magneto-optical  disks.  Although  tradi‐
144              tional  DOS  sees  Syquest  disks  and  magneto-optical disks as
145              `giant floppy disks' which are unpartitioned, OS/2  and  Windows
146              NT  treat  them  like  hard disks, i.e. partitioned devices. The
147              partition flag is also useful DOSEMU hdimages. It is not  recom‐
148              mended  for  hard disks for which direct access to partitions is
149              available through mounting.
150
151       offset
152              Describes where in the file the MS-DOS file system starts.  This
153              is  useful  for  logical  partitions in DOSEMU hdimages, and for
154              ATARI ram disks. By default, this is zero, meaning that the file
155              system starts right at the beginning of the device or file.
156
157     Disk Geometry Configuration
158       Geometry  information  describes the physical characteristics about the
159       disk. Its has three purposes:
160
161       formatting
162              The geometry information is written into the boot sector of  the
163              newly  made  disk.  However,  you may also describe the geometry
164              information on  the  command  line.  See  section  mformat,  for
165              details.
166
167       filtering
168              On  some  Unixes  there  are device nodes which only support one
169              physical geometry. For instance, you might need a different node
170              to access a disk as high density or as low density. The geometry
171              is compared to the actual geometry stored on the boot sector  to
172              make  sure  that  this device node is able to correctly read the
173              disk. If the geometry doesn't match, this drive entry fails, and
174              the next drive entry bearing the same drive letter is tried. See
175              section multiple descriptions, for  more  details  on  supplying
176              several descriptions for one drive letter.
177
178              If  no  geometry  information  is  supplied in the configuration
179              file, all disks are accepted. On  Linux  (and  on  SPARC)  there
180              exist  device  nodes  with  configurable  geometry  (`/dev/fd0',
181              `/dev/fd1' etc), and thus filtering is not needed (and  ignored)
182              for disk drives.  (Mtools still does do filtering on plain files
183              (disk images) in Linux: this is mainly intended  for  test  pur‐
184              poses,  as  I  don't  have access to a Unix which would actually
185              need filtering).
186
187              If you do not need filtering, but want still a default  geometry
188              for  mformatting,  you  may switch off filtering using the mfor‐
189              mat_only flag.
190
191              If you want filtering, you should supply the  filter  flag.   If
192              you supply a geometry, you must supply one of both flags.
193
194       initial geometry
195              On  devices that support it (usually floppy devices), the geome‐
196              try information is also used to set the initial  geometry.  This
197              initial geometry is applied while reading the boot sector, which
198              contains the real geometry.  If no geometry information is  sup‐
199              plied  in the configuration file, or if the mformat_only flag is
200              supplied, no initial configuration is done.
201
202              On Linux, initial geometry is not really needed, as the  config‐
203              urable  devices are able to auto-detect the disk type accurately
204              enough (for most common formats) to read the boot sector.
205
206       Wrong geometry information may lead to very bizarre errors. That's  why
207       I  strongly  recommend that you add the mformat_only flag to your drive
208       description, unless you really need filtering or initial geometry.
209
210       The following geometry related variables are available:
211
212       cylinders
213       tracks The number of  cylinders.  (cylinders  is  the  preferred  form,
214              tracks is considered obsolete)
215
216       heads  The number of heads (sides).
217
218       sectors
219              The number of sectors per track.
220
221       Example: the following drive section describes a 1.44M drive:
222
223            drive a:
224                file="/dev/fd0H1440"
225                fat_bits=12
226                cylinders=80 heads=2 sectors=18
227                mformat_only
228
229
230
231       The following shorthand geometry descriptions are available:
232
233       1.44m  high density 3 1/2 disk. Equivalent to: fat_bits=12 cylinders=80
234              heads=2 sectors=18
235
236       1.2m   high density 5 1/4 disk. Equivalent to: fat_bits=12 cylinders=80
237              heads=2 sectors=15
238
239       720k   double  density  3  1/2  disk. Equivalent to: fat_bits=12 cylin‐
240              ders=80 heads=2 sectors=9
241
242       360k   double density 5 1/4 disk.  Equivalent  to:  fat_bits=12  cylin‐
243              ders=40 heads=2 sectors=9
244
245       The  shorthand  format  descriptions  may be amended. For example, 360k
246       sectors=8 describes a 320k  disk  and  is  equivalent  to:  fat_bits=12
247       cylinders=40 heads=2 sectors=8
248
249     Open Flags
250       Moreover, the following flags are available:
251
252       sync   All i/o operations are done synchronously
253
254       nodelay
255              The  device  or  file  is opened with the O_NDELAY flag. This is
256              needed on some non-Linux architectures.
257
258       exclusive
259              The device or file is opened with the  O_EXCL  flag.  On  Linux,
260              this ensures exclusive access to the floppy drive. On most other
261              architectures, and for plain files it has no effect at all.
262
263     General Purpose Drive Variables
264       The following general purpose drive variables are available.  Depending
265       to  their  type,  these variables can be set to a string (precmd) or an
266       integer (all others)
267
268       fat_bits
269              The number of FAT bits. This may be  12  or  16.  This  is  very
270              rarely  needed, as it can almost always be deduced from informa‐
271              tion in the boot sector. On the contrary, describing the  number
272              of  fat  bits  may  actually be harmful if you get it wrong. You
273              should only use it if mtools gets the  auto-detected  number  of
274              fat  bits  wrong,  or if you want to mformat a disk with a weird
275              number of fat bits.
276
277       codepage
278              Describes the DOS code page used for short filenames. This is  a
279              number between 1 and 999. By default, code page 850 is used. The
280              reason for this is because this code page contains most  of  the
281              characters  that are also available in ISO-Latin-1. You may also
282              specify a global code page for all drives by  using  the  global
283              default_codepage  parameter  (outside of any drive description).
284              This parameters exists starting at version 4.0.0
285
286       precmd
287              On some variants of Solaris, it is necessary to  call  'volcheck
288              -v'  before  opening a floppy device, in order for the system to
289              notice  that  there   is   indeed   a   disk   in   the   drive.
290              precmd="volcheck -v" in the drive clause establishes the desired
291              behavior.
292
293       blocksize
294              This parameter represents a default block size to be always used
295              on  this  device.   All I/O is done with multiples of this block
296              size, independently of the sector size registered  in  the  file
297              system's  boot  sector.   This  is  useful for character devices
298              whose sector size is not 512, such as for example CD-ROM  drives
299              on Solaris.
300
301       Only  the  file variable is mandatory. The other parameters may be left
302       out. In that case a default value or an auto-detected value is used.
303
304     General Purpose Drive Flags
305       A flag can either be set to 1 (enabled) or 0 (disabled). If  the  value
306       is omitted, it is enabled.  For example, scsi is equivalent to scsi=1
307
308       nolock
309              Instruct  mtools  to  not  use  locking  on this drive.  This is
310              needed  on  systems  with  buggy  locking  semantics.   However,
311              enabling  this  makes operation less safe in cases where several
312              users may access the same drive at the same time.
313
314       scsi   When set to 1, this option tells mtools  to  use  raw  SCSI  I/O
315              instead  of  the standard read/write calls to access the device.
316              Currently, this is supported on HP-UX, Solaris and SunOS.   This
317              is  needed  because  on  some  architectures,  such  as SunOS or
318              Solaris, PC media can't be accessed using  the  read  and  write
319              system  calls, because the OS expects them to contain a Sun spe‐
320              cific "disk label".
321
322              As raw SCSI access always uses the whole  device,  you  need  to
323              specify the "partition" flag in addition
324
325              On some architectures, such as Solaris, mtools needs root privi‐
326              leges to be able to use the scsi option.  Thus mtools should  be
327              installed  setuid  root on Solaris if you want to access Zip/Jaz
328              drives.  Thus, if the scsi flag is given, privileged is automat‐
329              ically implied, unless explicitly disabled by privileged=0
330
331              Mtools uses its root privileges to open the device, and to issue
332              the actual SCSI I/O calls.  Moreover, root privileges  are  only
333              used  for  drives  described in a system-wide configuration file
334              such as `/etc/mtools.conf',  and  not  for  those  described  in
335              `~/.mtoolsrc' or `$MTOOLSRC'.
336
337       privileged
338              When  set to 1, this instructs mtools to use its setuid and set‐
339              gid privileges for opening the given drive.  This option is only
340              valid  for  drives  described  in  the system-wide configuration
341              files (such as `/etc/mtools.conf', not `~/.mtoolsrc' or `$MTOOL‐
342              SRC').   Obviously, this option is also a no op if mtools is not
343              installed setuid or setgid.  This option is implied by 'scsi=1',
344              but  again  only for drives defined in system-wide configuration
345              files.  Privileged may also be set explicitly to 0, in order  to
346              tell  mtools not to use its privileges for a given drive even if
347              scsi=1 is set.
348
349              Mtools only needs to be installed setuid if you use  the  privi‐
350              leged or scsi drive variables.  If you do not use these options,
351              mtools works perfectly well even when not installed setuid root.
352
353       vold
354
355              Instructs mtools to interpret the device name as a vold  identi‐
356              fier  rather  than as a filename.  The vold identifier is trans‐
357              lated into  a  real  filename  using  the  media_findname()  and
358              media_oldaliases()  functions  of the volmgt library.  This flag
359              is only available if you configured mtools  with  the  --enable-
360              new-vold option before compilation.
361
362       swap
363
364              Consider the media as a word-swapped Atari disk.
365
366       use_xdf
367              If  this is set to a non-zero value, mtools also tries to access
368              this disk as an XDF disk. XDF is a high capacity format used  by
369              OS/2. This is off by default. See section XDF, for more details.
370
371       mformat_only
372              Tells  mtools  to use the geometry for this drive only for mfor‐
373              matting and not for filtering.
374
375       filter
376              Tells mtools to use the geometry for this drive both  for  mfor‐
377              matting and filtering.
378
379       remote
380              Tells mtools to connect to floppyd (see section  floppyd).
381
382     Supplying multiple descriptions for a drive
383       It  is  possible  to  supply multiple descriptions for a drive. In that
384       case, the descriptions are tried in order until one is found that fits.
385       Descriptions may fail for several reasons:
386
387       1.     because the geometry is not appropriate,
388
389       2.     because there is no disk in the drive,
390
391       3.     or because of other problems.
392
393       Multiple  definitions  are useful when using physical devices which are
394       only able to support one single disk geometry.  Example:
395
396            drive a: file="/dev/fd0H1440" 1.44m
397            drive a: file="/dev/fd0H720" 720k
398
399
400
401       This instructs mtools to use /dev/fd0H1440  for  1.44m  (high  density)
402       disks  and /dev/fd0H720 for 720k (double density) disks. On Linux, this
403       feature is not really needed, as the /dev/fd0 device is able to  handle
404       any geometry.
405
406       You  may  also  use  multiple drive descriptions to access both of your
407       physical drives through one drive letter:
408
409            drive z: file="/dev/fd0"
410            drive z: file="/dev/fd1"
411
412
413
414       With this description, mdir z: accesses your first physical drive if it
415       contains  a  disk.  If  the  first drive doesn't contain a disk, mtools
416       checks the second drive.
417
418       When using multiple configuration  files,  drive  descriptions  in  the
419       files  parsed  last override descriptions for the same drive in earlier
420       files. In order to avoid  this,  use  the  drive+  or  +drive  keywords
421       instead  of  drive. The first adds a description to the end of the list
422       (i.e. it will be tried last), and the first adds it to the start of the
423       list.
424
425   Location of configuration files and parsing order
426       The configuration files are parsed in the following order:
427
428       1.     compiled-in defaults
429
430       2.     `/etc/mtools.conf'
431
432       3.     `~/.mtoolsrc'.
433
434       4.     `$MTOOLSRC'  (file  pointed  by the MTOOLSRC environmental vari‐
435              able)
436
437       Options described in the later files override those  described  in  the
438       earlier  files. Drives defined in earlier files persist if they are not
439       overridden in the later files. For instance, drives  A  and  B  may  be
440       defined  in  `/etc/mtools.conf'  and  drives  C and D may be defined in
441       `~/.mtoolsrc' However, if `~/.mtoolsrc' also defines drive A, this  new
442       description   would   override   the   description   of   drive   A  in
443       `/etc/mtools.conf' instead of adding to it. If you want to  add  a  new
444       description  to  a drive already described in an earlier file, you need
445       to use either the +drive or drive+ keyword.
446
447   Backwards compatibility with old configuration file syntax
448       The syntax described herein is new  for  version  mtools-3.0.  The  old
449       line-oriented  syntax  is  still  supported. Each line beginning with a
450       single letter is considered to be a drive  description  using  the  old
451       syntax.  Old style and new style drive sections may be mixed within the
452       same configuration file, in order to make upgrading easier. Support for
453       the  old syntax will be phased out eventually, and in order to discour‐
454       age its use, I purposefully omit its description here.
455

See also

457       mtools
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460
461MTOOLS                              22Mar20                          mtools(5)
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