Yes, there is support on the Sun machines for transferring files to your PC machine using a floppy disk.
Insert your disk into the floppy disk drive and execute the command:
volcheck
This instructs the Solaris operating system to check for disks in the removable media disk drives.
When volcheck detects the disk drive it creates a mount point for the
drive at /floppy/floppy0. You may want to create a link to this mount
point in your home directory using the following command:
ln -s /floppy/floppy0 a
This will make the floppy disk accessible to you as ~/a. The command
ls ~/a will generate a directory listing for the floppy disk.
You can copy files to or from the floppy disk or perform any other operations on them
as if they were files stored somewhere in your Unix directory hierarchy. You do need
to be careful of the differences in file structure between Unix and the PC DOS world.
Binary files, like zip files, can copy directly. With any text file, however,
there is an incompatibility. Unix uses a newline character as its end of line
indicator whereas the PC world uses a carriage return followed by a newline character.
There are two programs, unix2dos and dos2unix, that can
help you do the conversion. To copy one of your java source files to the floppy disk
you could use
unix2dos -ascii file.java ~/a/file.java
There is also another set of tools known as the mtools that provide a full suite of programs for dealing with MS-DOS floppy disks. The following is a table of some of these tools
| Program | Description |
mcd |
change MSDOS directory |
mcopy |
copy MSDOS files to/from Unix |
mdel |
delete an MSDOS file |
mdir |
display an MSDOS directory |
mformat |
add an MSDOS filesystem to a low-level formatted diskette |
mread |
read (copy) an MSDOS file to Unix |
mtype |
display contents of an MSDOS file |
mwrite |
low level write (copy) a Unix file to MSDOS |
You can find out information about any one of these mtools by reading the man page for
the command. The floppy disk drive is referenced as a: similar to the
way it is specified in the PC world. For example, to copy a file from your floppy
disk to the current Unix directory you would use the command
mcopy a:file
If the file is a text file then you would need to do ASCII end of line translation. The command for this might be
mcopy -t a:file.txt ~/newname.txt
Oh, the last piece of information you would probably like to know is how to get your
floppy disk out of the disk drive. The command eject will do that for
you.