mtools
mtools.1(3) MTOOLS mtools.1(3)
Name
mtools.conf - mtools configuration files
Description
This manpage describes the configuration files for mtools. They are
called ‘/etc/mtools.conf’ and ‘~/.mtoolsrc’. If the environmental
variable MTOOLSRC is set, its contents is used as the filename for a
third configuration file. These configuration files describe the fol-
lowing items:
* Global configuration flags and variables
* Per drive flags and variables
* Character translation tables
Location of the configuration files
‘/etc/mtools.conf’ is the system-wide configuration file, and
‘~/.mtoolsrc’ is the user’s private configuration file.
On some systems, the system-wide configuration file is called
‘/etc/defaults/mtools.conf’ instead.
General configuration file syntax
The configuration files is made up of sections. Each section starts
with a keyword identifying the section followed by a colon. Then fol-
low variable assignments and flags. Variable assignments take the fol-
lowing form:
name=value
Flags are lone keywords without an equal sign and value following
them. A section either ends at the end of the file or where the next
section begins.
Lines starting with a hash (#) are comments. Newline characters are
equivalent to whitespace (except where ending a comment). The configu-
ration file is case insensitive, except for item enclosed in quotes
(such as filenames).
Default values
For most platforms, mtools contains reasonable compiled-in defaults
for physical floppy drives. Thus, you usually don’t need to bother
with the configuration file, if all you want to do with mtools is to
access your floppy drives. On the other hand, the configuration file
is needed if you also want to use mtools to access your hard disk par-
titions and dosemu image files.
Global variables
Global flags may be set to 1 or to 0.
The following global flags are recognized:
MTOOLS_SKIP_CHECK
If this is set to 1, mtools skips most of its sanity checks.
This is needed to read some Atari disks which have been made
with the earlier ROMs, and which would not be recognized other-
wise.
MTOOLS_FAT_COMPATIBILITY
If this is set to 1, mtools skips the fat size checks. Some
disks have a bigger FAT than they really need to. These are
rejected if this option is not set.
MTOOLS_LOWER_CASE
If this is set to 1, mtools displays all-upper-case short file-
names as lowercase. This has been done to allow a behavior
which is consistent with older versions of mtools which didn’t
know about the case bits.
MTOOLS_NO_VFAT
If this is set to 1, mtools won’t generate VFAT entries for
filenames which are mixed-case, but otherwise legal dos file-
names. This is useful when working with DOS versions which
can’t grok VFAT longnames, such as FreeDos.
MTOOLS_DOTTED_DIR
In a wide directory, prints the short name with a dot instead
of spaces separating the basename and the extension.
MTOOLS_NAME_NUMERIC_TAIL
If this is set to one (default), generate numeric tails for all
long names (~1). If set to zero, only generate numeric tails
if otherwise a clash would have happened.
MTOOLS_TWENTY_FOUR_HOUR_CLOCK
If 1, uses the European notation for times (twenty four hour
clock), else uses the UK/US notation (am/pm)
Example: Inserting the following line into your configuration file
instructs mtools to skip the sanity checks:
MTOOLS_SKIP_CHECK=1
Global variables may also be set via the environment:
export MTOOLS_SKIP_CHECK=1
Global string variables may be set to any value:
MTOOLS_DATE_STRING
The format used for printing dates of files. By default, is
dd-mm-yyyy.
Per drive flags and variables
General information
Per drive flags and values may be described in a drive section. A
drive section starts with drive "driveletter" :
Then follow variable-value pairs and flags.
This is a sample drive description:
drive a:
file="/dev/fd0" use_xdf=1
Disk Geometry Configuration
Geometry information describes the physical characteristics about the
disk. Its has three purposes:
formatting
The geometry information is written into the boot sector of the
newly made disk. However, you may also describe the geometry
information on the command line. See section mformat, for
details.
filtering
On some Unices there are device nodes which only support one
physical geometry. For instance, you might need a different
node to access a disk as high density or as low density. The
geometry is compared to the actual geometry stored on the boot
sector to make sure that this device node is able to correctly
read the disk. If the geometry doesn’t match, this drive entry
fails, and the next drive entry bearing the same drive letter
is tried. See section multiple descriptions, for more details
on supplying several descriptions for one drive letter.
If no geometry information is supplied in the configuration
file, all disks are accepted. On Linux (and on Sparc) there
exist device nodes with configurable geometry (‘/dev/fd0’,
‘/dev/fd1’ etc), and thus filtering is not needed (and ignored)
for disk drives. (Mtools still does do filtering on plain
files (disk images) in Linux: this is mainly intended for test
purposes, as I don’t have access to a Unix which would actually
need filtering).
If you do not need filtering, but want still a default geometry
for mformatting, you may switch off filtering using the mfor-
mat_only flag.
If you want filtering, you should supply the filter flag. If
you supply a geometry, you must supply one of both flags.
initial geometry
On devices that support it (usually floppy devices), the geome-
try information is also used to set the initial geometry. This
initial geometry is applied while reading the boot sector,
which contains the real geometry. If no geometry information
is supplied in the configuration file, or if the mformat_only
flag is supplied, no initial configuration is done.
On Linux, initial geometry is not really needed, as the config-
urable devices are able to auto-detect the disk type accurately
enough (for most common formats) to read the boot sector.
Wrong geometry information may lead to very bizarre errors. That’s why
I strongly recommend that you add the mformat_only flag to your drive
description, unless you really need filtering or initial geometry.
The following geometry related variables are available:
cylinders
tracks The number of cylinders. (cylinders is the preferred form,
tracks is considered obsolete)
heads The number of heads (sides).
sectors
The number of sectors per track.
Example: the following drive section describes a 1.44M drive:
drive a:
file="/dev/fd0H1440"
fat_bits=12
cylinders=80 heads=2 sectors=18
mformat_only
The following shorthand geometry descriptions are available:
1.44m high density 3 1/2 disk. Equivalent to: fat_bits=12 cylin-
ders=80 heads=2 sectors=18
1.2m high density 5 1/4 disk. Equivalent to: fat_bits=12 cylin-
ders=80 heads=2 sectors=15
720k double density 3 1/2 disk. Equivalent to: fat_bits=12 cylin-
ders=80 heads=2 sectors=9
360k double density 5 1/4 disk. Equivalent to: fat_bits=12 cylin-
ders=40 heads=2 sectors=9
The shorthand format descriptions may be amended. For example, 360k
sectors=8 describes a 320k disk and is equivalent to: fat_bits=12
cylinders=40 heads=2 sectors=8
Open Flags
Moreover, the following flags are available:
sync All i/o operations are done synchronously
nodelay
The device or file is opened with the O_NDELAY flag. This is
needed on some non-Linux architectures.
exclusive
The device or file is opened with the O_EXCL flag. On Linux,
this ensures exclusive access to the floppy drive. On most
other architectures, and for plain files it has no effect at
all.
General Purpose Drive Variables
The following general purpose drive variables are available. Depend-
ing to their type, these variables can be set to a string (file,
precmd) or an integer (all others)
file The name of the file or device holding the disk image. This is
mandatory. The file name should be enclosed in quotes.
partition
Tells mtools to treat the drive as a partitioned device, and to
use the given partition. Only primary partitions are accessible
using this method, and they are numbered from 1 to 4. For logi-
cal partitions, use the more general offset variable. The par-
tition variable is intended for removable media such as
Syquests, ZIP drives, and magneto-optical disks. Although tra-
ditional DOS sees Syquests and magneto-optical disks as ‘giant
floppy disks’ which are unpartitioned, OS/2 and Windows NT
treat them like hard disks, i.e. partioned devices. The parti-
tion flag is also useful DOSEMU hdimages. It is not recommended
for hard disks for which direct access to partitions is
available through mounting.
offset
Describes where in the file the MS-DOS filesystem starts. This
is useful for logical partitions in DOSEMU hdimages, and for
ATARI ram disks. By default, this is zero, meaning that the
filesystem starts right at the beginning of the device or file.
fat_bits
The number of FAT bits. This may be 12 or 16. This is very
rarely needed, as it can almost always be deduced from informa-
tion in the boot sector. On the contrary, describing the number
of fat bits may actually be harmful if you get it wrong. You
should only use it if mtools gets the autodetected number of
fat bits wrong, or if you want to mformat a disk with a weird
number of fat bits.
precmd
On some variants of Solaris, it is necessary to call ’volcheck
-v’ before opening a floppy device, in order for the system to
notice that there is indeed a disk in the drive.
precmd="volcheck -v" in the drive clause establishes the
desired behavior.
blocksize
This parameter represents a default block size to be always
used on this device. All I/O is done with multiples of this
block size, independantly of the sector size registered in the
filesystem’s boot sector. This is useful for character devices
whose sector size is not 512, such as for example CD Rom drives
on Solaris.
Only the file variable is mandatory. The other parameters may be left
out. In that case a default value or an autodetected value is used.
General Purpose Drive Flags
A flag can either be set to 1 (enabled) or 0 (disabled). If the value
is ommitted, it is enabled. For example, scsi is equivalent to scsi=1
nolock
Instruct mtools to not use locking on this drive. This is
needed on systems with buggy locking semantics. However,
enabling this makes operation less safe in cases where several
users may access the same drive at the same time.
scsi When set to 1, this option tells mtools to use raw SCSI I/O
instead of the standard read/write calls to access the device.
Currently, this is supported on HP/UX, Solaris and SunOs. This
is needed because on some architectures, such as SunOs or
Solaris, PC media can’t be accessed using the read and write
syscalls, because the OS expects them to contain a Sun specific
"disk label".
As raw Scsi access always uses the whole device, you need to
specify the "partition" flag in addition
On some architectures, such as Solaris, mtools needs root priv-
ileges to be able to use the scsi option. Thus mtools should
be installed set uid root on Solaris if you want to access
Zip/Jaz drives. Thus, if the scsi flag is given, privileged is
automatically implied, unless explicitly disabled by privi-
leged=0
Mtools uses its root privileges to open the device, and to
issue the actual SCSI I/O calls. Moreover, root privileges are
only used for drives described in a system-wide configuration
file such as ‘/etc/mtools.conf’, and not for those described in
‘~/.mtoolsrc’ or ‘$MTOOLSRC’.
privileged
When set to 1, this instructs mtools to use its set-uid and
set-gid privileges for opening the given drive. This option is
only valid for drives described in the system-wide configura-
tion files (such as ‘/etc/mtools.conf’, not ‘~/.mtoolsrc’ or
‘$MTOOLSRC’). Obviously, this option is also a no op if mtools
is not installed setuid or setgid. This option is implied by
’scsi=1’, but again only for drives defined in system-wide con-
figuration files. Privileged may also be set explicitely to 0,
in order to tell mtools not to use its privileges for a given
drive even if scsi=1 is set.
Mtools only needs to be installed setuid if you use the privi-
leged or scsi drive variables. If you do not use these
options, mtools works perfectly well even when not installed
setuid root.
vold
Instructs mtools to interpret the device name as a vold identi-
fier rather than as a filename. The vold identifier is trans-
lated into a real filename using the media_findname() and
media_oldaliases() functions of the volmgt library. This flag
is only available if you configured mtools with the --enable-
new-vold option before compilation.
swap
Consider the media as a word-swapped Atari disk.
use_xdf
If this is set to a non-zero value, mtools also tries to access
this disk as an XDF disk. XDF is a high capacity format used by
OS/2. This is off by default. See section XDF, for more
details.
mformat_only
Tells mtools to use the geometry for this drive only for mfor-
matting and not for filtering.
filter
Tells mtools to use the geometry for this drive both for mfor-
matting and filtering.
remote
Tells mtools to connect to floppyd (see section floppyd).
Supplying multiple descriptions for a drive
It is possible to supply multiple descriptions for a drive. In that
case, the descriptions are tried in order until one is found that
fits. Descriptions may fail for several reasons:
1. because the geometry is not appropriate,
2. because there is no disk in the drive,
3. or because of other problems.
Multiple definitions are useful when using physical devices which are
only able to support one single disk geometry. Example:
drive a: file="/dev/fd0H1440" 1.44m
drive a: file="/dev/fd0H720" 720k
This instructs mtools to use /dev/fd0H1440 for 1.44m (high density)
disks and /dev/fd0H720 for 720k (double density) disks. On Linux, this
feature is not really needed, as the /dev/fd0 device is able to handle
any geometry.
You may also use multiple drive descriptions to access both of your
physical drives through one drive letter:
drive z: file="/dev/fd0"
drive z: file="/dev/fd1"
With this description, mdir z: accesses your first physical drive if
it contains a disk. If the first drive doesn’t contain a disk, mtools
checks the second drive.
When using multiple configuration files, drive descriptions in the
files parsed last override descriptions for the same drive in earlier
files. In order to avoid this, use the drive+ or +drive keywords
instead of drive. The first adds a description to the end of the list
(i.e. it will be tried last), and the first adds it to the start of
the list.
Character set translation tables
If you live in the USA, in Western Europe or in Australia, you may
skip this section.
Why character set translation tables are needed
DOS uses a different character code mapping than Unix. 7-bit charac-
ters still have the same meaning, only characters with the eight bit
set are affected. To make matters worse, there are several translation
tables available depending on the country where you are. The appear-
ance of the characters is defined using code pages. These code pages
aren’t the same for all countries. For instance, some code pages don’t
contain upper case accented characters. On the other hand, some code
pages contain characters which don’t exist in Unix, such as certain
line-drawing characters or accented consonants used by some Eastern
European countries. This affects two things, relating to filenames:
upper case characters
In short names, only upper case characters are allowed. This
also holds for accented characters. For instance, in a code
page which doesn’t contain accented uppercase characters, the
accented lowercase characters get transformed into their unac-
cented counterparts.
long file names
Micro$oft has finally come to their senses and uses a more
standard mapping for the long file names. They use Unicode,
which is basically a 32 bit version of ASCII. Its first 256
characters are identical to Unix ASCII. Thus, the code page
also affects the correspondence between the codes used in long
names and those used in short names
Mtools considers the filenames entered on the command line as having
the Unix mapping, and translates the characters to get short names.
By default, code page 850 is used with the Swiss uppercase/lowercase
mapping. I chose this code page, because its set of existing charac-
ters most closely matches Unix’s. Moreover, this code page covers most
characters in use in the USA, Australia and Western Europe. However,
it is still possible to chose a different mapping. There are two meth-
ods: the country variable and explicit tables.
Configuration using Country
The COUNTRY variable is recommended for people which also have access
to MS-DOS system files and documentation. If you don’t have access to
these, I’d suggest you’d rather use explicit tables instead.
Syntax:
COUNTRY="country[,[codepage], country-file]"
This tells mtools to use a Unix-to-DOS translation table which matches
codepage and an lowercase-to-uppercase table for country and to use
the country-file file to get the lowercase-to-uppercase table. The
country code is most often the telephone prefix of the country. Refer
to the DOS help page on "country" for more details. The codepage and
the country-file parameters are optional. Please don’t type in the
square brackets, they are only there to say which parameters are
optional. The country-file file is supplied with MS-DOS, and is usu-
ally called ‘COUNTRY.SYS’, and stored in the ‘C:\DOS’ directory. In
most cases you don’t need it, as the most common translation tables
are compiled into mtools. So, don’t worry if you run a Unix-only box
which lacks this file.
If codepage is not given, a per country default code page is used. If
the country-file parameter isn’t given, compiled-in defaults are used
for the lowercase-to-uppercase table. This is useful for other Unices
than Linux, which may have no ‘COUNTRY.SYS’ file available online.
The Unix-to-DOS are not contained in the ‘COUNTRY.SYS’ file, and thus
mtools always uses compiled-in defaults for those. Thus, only a lim-
ited amount of code pages are supported. If your preferred code page
is missing, or if you know the name of the Windows 95 file which con-
tains this mapping, could you please drop me a line at alain@linux.lu.
The COUNTRY variable can also be set using the environment.
Configuration using explicit translation tables
Translation tables may be described in line in the configuration file.
Two tables are needed: first the DOS-to-Unix table, and then the Low-
ercase-to-Uppercase table. A DOS-to-Unix table starts with the tounix
keyword, followed by a colon, and 128 hexadecimal numbers. A lower-
to-upper table starts with the fucase keyword, followed by a colon,
and 128 hexadecimal numbers.
The tables only show the translations for characters whose codes is
greater than 128, because translation for lower codes is trivial.
Example:
tounix:
0xc7 0xfc 0xe9 0xe2 0xe4 0xe0 0xe5 0xe7
0xea 0xeb 0xe8 0xef 0xee 0xec 0xc4 0xc5
0xc9 0xe6 0xc6 0xf4 0xf6 0xf2 0xfb 0xf9
0xff 0xd6 0xdc 0xf8 0xa3 0xd8 0xd7 0x5f
0xe1 0xed 0xf3 0xfa 0xf1 0xd1 0xaa 0xba
0xbf 0xae 0xac 0xbd 0xbc 0xa1 0xab 0xbb
0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0xc1 0xc2 0xc0
0xa9 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0xa2 0xa5 0xac
0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0xe3 0xc3
0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0xa4
0xf0 0xd0 0xc9 0xcb 0xc8 0x69 0xcd 0xce
0xcf 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x5f 0x7c 0x49 0x5f
0xd3 0xdf 0xd4 0xd2 0xf5 0xd5 0xb5 0xfe
0xde 0xda 0xd9 0xfd 0xdd 0xde 0xaf 0xb4
0xad 0xb1 0x5f 0xbe 0xb6 0xa7 0xf7 0xb8
0xb0 0xa8 0xb7 0xb9 0xb3 0xb2 0x5f 0x5f
fucase:
0x80 0x9a 0x90 0xb6 0x8e 0xb7 0x8f 0x80
0xd2 0xd3 0xd4 0xd8 0xd7 0xde 0x8e 0x8f
0x90 0x92 0x92 0xe2 0x99 0xe3 0xea 0xeb
0x59 0x99 0x9a 0x9d 0x9c 0x9d 0x9e 0x9f
0xb5 0xd6 0xe0 0xe9 0xa5 0xa5 0xa6 0xa7
0xa8 0xa9 0xaa 0xab 0xac 0xad 0xae 0xaf
0xb0 0xb1 0xb2 0xb3 0xb4 0xb5 0xb6 0xb7
0xb8 0xb9 0xba 0xbb 0xbc 0xbd 0xbe 0xbf
0xc0 0xc1 0xc2 0xc3 0xc4 0xc5 0xc7 0xc7
0xc8 0xc9 0xca 0xcb 0xcc 0xcd 0xce 0xcf
0xd1 0xd1 0xd2 0xd3 0xd4 0x49 0xd6 0xd7
0xd8 0xd9 0xda 0xdb 0xdc 0xdd 0xde 0xdf
0xe0 0xe1 0xe2 0xe3 0xe5 0xe5 0xe6 0xe8
0xe8 0xe9 0xea 0xeb 0xed 0xed 0xee 0xef
0xf0 0xf1 0xf2 0xf3 0xf4 0xf5 0xf6 0xf7
0xf8 0xf9 0xfa 0xfb 0xfc 0xfd 0xfe 0xff
The first table maps DOS character codes to Unix character codes. For
example, the DOS character number 129. This is a u with to dots on top
of it. To translate it into Unix, we look at the character number 1 in
the first table (1 = 129 - 128). This is 0xfc. (Beware, numbering
starts at 0). The second table maps lower case DOS characters to
upper case DOS characters. The same lower case u with dots maps to
character 0x9a, which is an uppercase U with dots in DOS.
Unicode characters greater than 256
If an existing MS-DOS name contains Unicode character greater than
256, these are translated to underscores or to characters which are
close in visual appearance. For example, accented consonants are
translated into their unaccented counterparts. This translation is
used for mdir and for the Unix filenames generated by mcopy. Linux
does support Unicode too, but unfortunately too few applications sup-
port it yet to bother with it in mtools. Most importantly, xterm can’t
display Unicode yet. If there is sufficient demand, I might include
support for Unicode in the Unix filenames as well.
Caution: When deleting files with mtools, the underscore matches all
characters which can’t be represented in Unix. Be careful with mdel!
Location of configuration files and parsing order
The configuration files are parsed in the following order:
1. compiled-in defaults
2. ‘/etc/mtools.conf’
3. ‘/etc/mtools’ This is for backwards compatibility only, and is
only parsed if ‘mtools.conf’ doesn’t exist.
4. ‘~/.mtoolsrc’.
5. ‘$MTOOLSRC’ (file pointed by the MTOOLSRC environmental vari-
able)
Options described in the later files override those described in the
earlier files. Drives defined in earlier files persist if they are not
overridden in the later files. For instance, drives A and B may be
defined in ‘/etc/mtools.conf’ and drives C and D may be defined in
‘~/.mtoolsrc’ However, if ‘~/.mtoolsrc’ also defines drive A, this new
description would override the description of drive A in
‘/etc/mtools.conf’ instead of adding to it. If you want to add a new
description to a drive already described in an earlier file, you need
to use either the +drive or drive+ keyword.
Backwards compatibility with old configuration file syntax
The syntax described herein is new for version mtools-3.0. The old
line-oriented syntax is still supported. Each line beginning with a
single letter is considered to be a drive description using the old
syntax. Old style and new style drive sections may be mixed within the
same configuration file, in order to make upgrading easier. Support
for the old syntax will be phased out eventually, and in order to dis-
courage its use, I purposefully omit its description here.
See also
mtools
MTOOLS 03Mar03 mtools.1(3)
