The Ftape Tools Manual - Ftformat
ftformat is the user-space backend that interfaces with the
formatting ioctls provided by the ftape floppy tape device driver
for Linux. The ioctl interface is documented elsewhere.
See Formatting of cartridges using MTIOCFTFORMAT
(info file ftape-4). See Sending raw commands to the tape drive (info file ftape-4).
ftformat should work with ftape-3.04d as well as with ftape-4.03. ftape-2.x does not support formatting of cartridges.
There was a major change in the interface provided by the ftape kernel driver when progressing from version 3.x to version 4.x. See Start formatting a tape track (info file ftape-4). See Start formatting a tape track (info file ftape).
Therefore, if you have an old version of ftformat installed, then you can't use it any more with ftape-4.03, but you can use the older interface supplied by ftape-3.04d with the newer version of ftformat.
You can determine the version of ftformat by running ftformat --version
. This will produce the following output with the old
version of ftformat:
root@anaxagoras:claus# ftformat --version ftformat ftformat 1.0
whereas the new version supplied with this package will give the following banner:
root@anaxagoras:claus# ftformat --version ftformat (ftape-tools) 1.08
The `ftape-tools
' string indicates that it is part of the ftape-tools
package (see Overview).
The Tcl/Tk
interface ftape-tool (see Ftape-tool) uses
ftformat as a backend for its formatting dialog.
![]() |
Use these buttons to jump to the top menu |