MT(1) | General Commands Manual | MT(1) |
mt
— magnetic tape
manipulation
mt |
[-f tapename]
command [count] |
The mt
program is used to give commands to
a magnetic tape drive. By default mt
performs the
requested operation once. Operations may be performed multiple times by
specifying count.
Note that tapename must reference a raw (not
block) tape device. If tapename is of the form
"host:tapename", or "user@host:tapename",
mt
writes to the named tape device on the remote
host using rmt(8).
The rmt(8) process on
the remote host is typically initiated via
rsh(1), although an alternate
method such as ssh(1) can be
specified via the RCMD_CMD
environment variable.
The available commands are listed below. Only as many characters as are required to uniquely identify a command need be specified.
asf
eof
,
weof
fsf
fsr
bsf
bsr
rewind
offline
,
rewoffl
status
retension
erase
eew
eom
blocksize
,
setblk
density
,
setdensity
rdspos
rdhpos
setspos
sethpos
compress
cache
nocache
If a tape name is not specified, and the environment variable
TAPE
is not set, then mt
uses the device /dev/nrst0.
If the following environment variables exist, they are used by
mt
.
mt
returns a 0 exit status when the
operation(s) were successful, 1 if the command was unrecognized, and 2 if an
operation failed.
The SCSI-3 specification defines a number of density codes for various tape media, some of which are listed here. Note that many tape drive vendors also define model-specific codes.
Code | Format |
0 |
Device default |
1 |
1/2" 800 bpi |
2 |
1/2" 1600 bpi |
3 |
1/2" 6250 bpi |
4 |
QIC-11 |
5 |
QIC-24 |
15 |
QIC-120 |
16 |
QIC-150 |
17 |
QIC-320/525 |
18 |
QIC-1320/1350 |
19 |
DDS |
28 |
QIC-385M |
29 |
QIC-410M |
30 |
QIC-1000C |
31 |
QIC-2100C |
32 |
QIC-6GB |
33 |
QIC-20GB |
34 |
QIC-2GB |
35 |
QIC-875M |
36 |
DDS-2 |
37 |
DDS-3 |
38 |
DDS-4 |
The mt
utility appeared in
4.3BSD.
September 1, 2018 | NetBSD 10.99 |