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 `/etc/de‐
26       fault/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  re‐
66              jected 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  in‐
98       structs 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 `gi‐
145              ant floppy disks' which are unpartitioned, OS/2 and  Windows  NT
146              treat them like hard disks, i.e. partitioned devices. The parti‐
147              tion flag is also useful DOSEMU hdimages. It is not  recommended
148              for  hard  disks for which direct access to partitions is avail‐
149              able 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 in‐
164              formation on the command line. See section mformat, for details.
165
166       filtering
167              On some Unixes there are device nodes  which  only  support  one
168              physical geometry. For instance, you might need a different node
169              to access a disk as high density or as low density. The geometry
170              is  compared to the actual geometry stored on the boot sector to
171              make sure that this device node is able to  correctly  read  the
172              disk. If the geometry doesn't match, this drive entry fails, and
173              the next drive entry bearing the same drive letter is tried. See
174              section  multiple  descriptions,  for  more details on supplying
175              several descriptions for one drive letter.
176
177              If no geometry information  is  supplied  in  the  configuration
178              file,  all disks are accepted. On Linux (and on SPARC) there ex‐
179              ist  device  nodes  with  configurable   geometry   (`/dev/fd0',
180              `/dev/fd1'  etc), and thus filtering is not needed (and ignored)
181              for disk drives.  (Mtools still does do filtering on plain files
182              (disk  images)  in  Linux: this is mainly intended for test pur‐
183              poses, as I don't have access to a  Unix  which  would  actually
184              need filtering).
185
186              If  you do not need filtering, but want still a default geometry
187              for mformatting, you may switch off filtering  using  the  mfor‐
188              mat_only flag.
189
190              If  you  want  filtering, you should supply the filter flag.  If
191              you supply a geometry, you must supply one of both flags.
192
193       initial geometry
194              On devices that support it (usually floppy devices), the  geome‐
195              try  information  is also used to set the initial geometry. This
196              initial geometry is applied while reading the boot sector, which
197              contains  the real geometry.  If no geometry information is sup‐
198              plied in the configuration file, or if the mformat_only flag  is
199              supplied, no initial configuration is done.
200
201              On  Linux, initial geometry is not really needed, as the config‐
202              urable devices are able to auto-detect the disk type  accurately
203              enough (for most common formats) to read the boot sector.
204
205       Wrong  geometry information may lead to very bizarre errors. That's why
206       I strongly recommend that you add the mformat_only flag to  your  drive
207       description, unless you really need filtering or initial geometry.
208
209       The following geometry related variables are available:
210
211       cylinders
212       tracks The  number  of  cylinders.  (cylinders  is  the preferred form,
213              tracks is considered obsolete)
214
215       heads  The number of heads (sides).
216
217       sectors
218              The number of sectors per track.
219
220       Example: the following drive section describes a 1.44M drive:
221
222            drive a:
223                file="/dev/fd0H1440"
224                fat_bits=12
225                cylinders=80 heads=2 sectors=18
226                mformat_only
227
228
229
230       The following shorthand geometry descriptions are available:
231
232       1.44m  high density 3 1/2 disk. Equivalent to: fat_bits=12 cylinders=80
233              heads=2 sectors=18
234
235       1.2m   high density 5 1/4 disk. Equivalent to: fat_bits=12 cylinders=80
236              heads=2 sectors=15
237
238       720k   double density 3 1/2 disk.  Equivalent  to:  fat_bits=12  cylin‐
239              ders=80 heads=2 sectors=9
240
241       360k   double  density  5  1/4  disk. Equivalent to: fat_bits=12 cylin‐
242              ders=40 heads=2 sectors=9
243
244       The shorthand format descriptions may be  amended.  For  example,  360k
245       sectors=8  describes  a  320k  disk  and  is equivalent to: fat_bits=12
246       cylinders=40 heads=2 sectors=8
247
248     Open Flags
249       Moreover, the following flags are available:
250
251       sync   All i/o operations are done synchronously
252
253       nodelay
254              The device or file is opened with the  O_NDELAY  flag.  This  is
255              needed on some non-Linux architectures.
256
257       exclusive
258              The  device  or  file  is opened with the O_EXCL flag. On Linux,
259              this ensures exclusive access to the floppy drive. On most other
260              architectures, and for plain files it has no effect at all.
261
262     General Purpose Drive Variables
263       The following general purpose drive variables are available.  Depending
264       to their type, these variables can be set to a string  (precmd)  or  an
265       integer (all others)
266
267       fat_bits
268              The  number  of  FAT  bits.  This  may be 12 or 16. This is very
269              rarely needed, as it can almost always be deduced from  informa‐
270              tion  in the boot sector. On the contrary, describing the number
271              of fat bits may actually be harmful if you  get  it  wrong.  You
272              should  only  use  it if mtools gets the auto-detected number of
273              fat bits wrong, or if you want to mformat a disk  with  a  weird
274              number of fat bits.
275
276       codepage
277              Describes  the DOS code page used for short filenames. This is a
278              number between 1 and 999. By default, code page 850 is used. The
279              reason  for  this is because this code page contains most of the
280              characters that are also available in ISO-Latin-1. You may  also
281              specify  a  global  code page for all drives by using the global
282              default_codepage parameter (outside of any  drive  description).
283              This parameters exists starting at version 4.0.0
284
285       data_map
286              Remaps  data  from  image  file.  This is useful for image files
287              which might need additional zero-filled sectors to be  inserted.
288              Such  is the case for instance for IBM 3174 floppy images. These
289              images represent floppy disks with fewer sectors on their  first
290              cylinder. These missing sectors are not stored in the image, but
291              are still counted in the filesystem layout. The data_map  allows
292              to  fake these missing sectors for the upper layers of mtools. A
293              data_map is a comma-separated sequence of source type and  size.
294              Source  type may be zero for zero-filled sectors created by map,
295              skip for data in raw image to be ignored (skipped), and  nothing
296              for  data  to be used as is (copied) from the raw image. Datamap
297              is automatically complemented by an  implicit  last  element  of
298              data  to  be used as is from current offset to end of file. Each
299              size is a number followed by a unit: s for a 512 byte sector,  K
300              for  Kbytes,  M  for megabytes, G for gigabytes, and nothing for
301              single bytes.
302
303              Example:
304
305              data_map=1s,zero31s,28s,skip1s would be a map for use  with  IBM
306              3174  floppy  images.  First sector (1s, boot sector) is used as
307              is. Then follow 31 fake zero-filled sectors (zero31s), then  the
308              next  28  sectors  from image (28s) are used as is (they contain
309              FAT and root directory), then one sector from image  is  skipped
310              (skip1s), and finally the rest of image is used as is (implicit)
311
312       precmd
313              On  some  variants of Solaris, it is necessary to call 'volcheck
314              -v' before opening a floppy device, in order for the  system  to
315              notice   that   there   is   indeed   a   disk   in  the  drive.
316              precmd="volcheck -v" in the drive clause establishes the desired
317              behavior.
318
319       blocksize
320              This parameter represents a default block size to be always used
321              on this device.  All I/O is done with multiples  of  this  block
322              size,  independently  of  the sector size registered in the file
323              system's boot sector.  This  is  useful  for  character  devices
324              whose  sector size is not 512, such as for example CD-ROM drives
325              on Solaris.
326
327       Only the file variable is mandatory. The other parameters may  be  left
328       out. In that case a default value or an auto-detected value is used.
329
330     General Purpose Drive Flags
331       A  flag  can either be set to 1 (enabled) or 0 (disabled). If the value
332       is omitted, it is enabled.  For example, scsi is equivalent to scsi=1
333
334       nolock
335              Instruct mtools to not use  locking  on  this  drive.   This  is
336              needed  on  systems  with buggy locking semantics.  However, en‐
337              abling this makes operation less safe  in  cases  where  several
338              users may access the same drive at the same time.
339
340       scsi   When  set to 1, this option tells mtools to use raw SCSI I/O in‐
341              stead of the standard read/write calls  to  access  the  device.
342              Currently,  this is supported on HP-UX, Solaris and SunOS.  This
343              is needed because on some architectures, such as  SunOS  or  So‐
344              laris,  PC media can't be accessed using the read and write sys‐
345              tem calls, because the OS expects them to contain a Sun specific
346              "disk label".
347
348              As  raw  SCSI  access  always uses the whole device, you need to
349              specify the "partition" flag in addition
350
351              On some architectures, such as Solaris, mtools needs root privi‐
352              leges  to be able to use the scsi option.  Thus mtools should be
353              installed setuid root on Solaris if you want to  access  Zip/Jaz
354              drives.  Thus, if the scsi flag is given, privileged is automat‐
355              ically implied, unless explicitly disabled by privileged=0
356
357              Mtools uses its root privileges to open the device, and to issue
358              the  actual  SCSI I/O calls.  Moreover, root privileges are only
359              used for drives described in a  system-wide  configuration  file
360              such  as  `/etc/mtools.conf',  and  not  for  those described in
361              `~/.mtoolsrc' or `$MTOOLSRC'.
362
363       privileged
364              When set to 1, this instructs mtools to use its setuid and  set‐
365              gid privileges for opening the given drive.  This option is only
366              valid for drives  described  in  the  system-wide  configuration
367              files (such as `/etc/mtools.conf', not `~/.mtoolsrc' or `$MTOOL‐
368              SRC').  Obviously, this option is also a no op if mtools is  not
369              installed setuid or setgid.  This option is implied by 'scsi=1',
370              but again only for drives defined in  system-wide  configuration
371              files.   Privileged may also be set explicitly to 0, in order to
372              tell mtools not to use its privileges for a given drive even  if
373              scsi=1 is set.
374
375              Mtools  only  needs to be installed setuid if you use the privi‐
376              leged or scsi drive variables.  If you do not use these options,
377              mtools works perfectly well even when not installed setuid root.
378
379       vold
380
381              Instructs  mtools to interpret the device name as a vold identi‐
382              fier rather than as a filename.  The vold identifier  is  trans‐
383              lated  into  a  real filename using the media_findname() and me‐
384              dia_oldaliases() functions of the volmgt library.  This flag  is
385              only  available  if you configured mtools with the --enable-new-
386              vold option before compilation.
387
388       swap
389
390              Consider the media as a word-swapped Atari disk.
391
392       use_xdf
393              If this is set to a non-zero value, mtools also tries to  access
394              this  disk as an XDF disk. XDF is a high capacity format used by
395              OS/2. This is off by default. See section XDF, for more details.
396
397       mformat_only
398              Tells mtools to use the geometry for this drive only  for  mfor‐
399              matting and not for filtering.
400
401       filter
402              Tells  mtools  to use the geometry for this drive both for mfor‐
403              matting and filtering.
404
405       remote
406              Tells mtools to connect to floppyd (see section  floppyd).
407
408     Supplying multiple descriptions for a drive
409       It is possible to supply multiple descriptions for  a  drive.  In  that
410       case, the descriptions are tried in order until one is found that fits.
411       Descriptions may fail for several reasons:
412
413       1.     because the geometry is not appropriate,
414
415       2.     because there is no disk in the drive,
416
417       3.     or because of other problems.
418
419       Multiple definitions are useful when using physical devices  which  are
420       only able to support one single disk geometry.  Example:
421
422            drive a: file="/dev/fd0H1440" 1.44m
423            drive a: file="/dev/fd0H720" 720k
424
425
426
427       This  instructs  mtools  to  use /dev/fd0H1440 for 1.44m (high density)
428       disks and /dev/fd0H720 for 720k (double density) disks. On Linux,  this
429       feature  is not really needed, as the /dev/fd0 device is able to handle
430       any geometry.
431
432       You may also use multiple drive descriptions to  access  both  of  your
433       physical drives through one drive letter:
434
435            drive z: file="/dev/fd0"
436            drive z: file="/dev/fd1"
437
438
439
440       With this description, mdir z: accesses your first physical drive if it
441       contains a disk. If the first drive  doesn't  contain  a  disk,  mtools
442       checks the second drive.
443
444       When  using  multiple  configuration  files,  drive descriptions in the
445       files parsed last override descriptions for the same drive  in  earlier
446       files.  In  order  to avoid this, use the drive+ or +drive keywords in‐
447       stead of drive. The first adds a description to the  end  of  the  list
448       (i.e. it will be tried last), and the first adds it to the start of the
449       list.
450
451   Location of configuration files and parsing order
452       The configuration files are parsed in the following order:
453
454       1.     compiled-in defaults
455
456       2.     `/etc/mtools.conf'
457
458       3.     `~/.mtoolsrc'.
459
460       4.     `$MTOOLSRC' (file pointed by the  MTOOLSRC  environmental  vari‐
461              able)
462
463       Options  described  in  the later files override those described in the
464       earlier files. Drives defined in earlier files persist if they are  not
465       overridden  in the later files. For instance, drives A and B may be de‐
466       fined in `/etc/mtools.conf' and drives  C  and  D  may  be  defined  in
467       `~/.mtoolsrc'  However, if `~/.mtoolsrc' also defines drive A, this new
468       description  would   override   the   description   of   drive   A   in
469       `/etc/mtools.conf'  instead  of  adding to it. If you want to add a new
470       description to a drive already described in an earlier file,  you  need
471       to use either the +drive or drive+ keyword.
472
473   Backwards compatibility with old configuration file syntax
474       The  syntax  described  herein  is  new for version mtools-3.0. The old
475       line-oriented syntax is still supported. Each  line  beginning  with  a
476       single  letter  is  considered  to be a drive description using the old
477       syntax. Old style and new style drive sections may be mixed within  the
478       same configuration file, in order to make upgrading easier. Support for
479       the old syntax will be phased out eventually, and in order to  discour‐
480       age its use, I purposefully omit its description here.
481

See also

483       mtools
484
485
486
487MTOOLS                              21Nov21                          mtools(5)
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