Yes, even in this day of networks, CD-RW drives, Zip disks, and more the lowly 3.5" floppy still has its place. Everyone has one, and it usually works. So, how can you make the best use of your floppy drive when transferring files? Here are a few tips and tricks...

Tar is your friend. Tar will preserve a whole directory structure painlessly, so take advantage of it. Tar also has floppy-friendly options, like allowing a tar to span multiple floppy disks.

1. Create a list of files to be moved
• ls -als * > foo
2. Edit foo, put an '=' in front of every file you do *NOT* want to move
3. Figure out how much data you're moving (expect to get about 1440 Kb per floppy)
• du --total `grep -v = foo|awk '{print $10}'`
4. Create a new file without the files you aren't moving
• grep -v = foo|awk '{print $10}' > foo1
5. Create a tarball of the files you are moving on floppies
• tar -cMpvf /dev/fd0 --files-from foo1
6. transfer the floppy to the other machine, and extract the files
• tar -xMpf /dev/fd0

The tar options used are:

• x = extract
• c = create
• M = multiple floppies
• p = preserve times
• v = verbose
• f = filename/device (must be last)

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