1MT(1) General Commands Manual MT(1)
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6 mt - magnetic tape manipulating program
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9 mt [ -f tapename ] command [ count ]
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12 Mt is used to give commands to a magnetic tape drive. If a tape name
13 is not specified, the environment variable TAPE is used; if TAPE does
14 not exist, mt uses the device /dev/rmt12. Note that tapename must ref‐
15 erence a raw (not block) tape device. By default mt performs the
16 requested operation once. Operations may be performed multiple times
17 by specifying count.
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19 The available commands are listed below. Only as many characters as
20 are required to uniquely identify a command need be specified.
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22 eof, weof
23 Write count end-of-file marks at the current position on the
24 tape.
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26 fsf Forward space count files.
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28 fsr Forward space count records.
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30 bsf Back space count files.
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32 bsr Back space count records.
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34 rewind Rewind the tape (Count is ignored).
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36 offline, rewoffl
37 Rewind the tape and place the tape unit off-line (Count is
38 ignored).
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40 status Print status information about the tape unit.
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42 cacheon
43 Enable the readahead/writebehind cache on the tape unit.
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45 cacheoff
46 Turn off the readahead/writebehind cache on the tape unit.
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48 Mt returns a 0 exit status when the operation(s) were successful, 1 if
49 the command was unrecognized, and 2 if an operation failed.
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51 The cacheon and cacheoff commands currently only apply to the TMSCP
52 driver and then only for certain drives such as the TU81+. No error is
53 produced by the TMSCP driver if the cache commands are used. Other
54 drivers will return an error code since they do not recognize the
55 MTCACHE and MTNOCACHE functions codes. See mtio(4).
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58 /dev/rmt* Raw magnetic tape interface
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61 mtio(4), tmscp(4), dd(1), ioctl(2), environ(7)
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654th Berkeley Distribution December 22, 1995 MT(1)