How do I establish whether the tape in a tape drive is writable ?

From: Niall Macpherson (niall.macpherson_at_moneyline.com)
Date: 06/20/03 

Date: 20 Jun 2003 02:37:30 -0700

I have a backup script which runs at 2 am in the morning every day.

However , I would like to run a cron job in the afternoon on the
previous day which will mail someone if the backup tape is not present
or not writeable.

I have tried using the output from the mt command using the status
option.

This is fine if there is no tape in the drive since I get this output

# mt -f /dev/rmt/0 status
HP DDS-3 4MM DAT tape drive:
   sense key(0x6)= Unit Attention residual= 0 retries= 0
   file no= 0 block no= 0

if there is a tape , and this output

# mt -f /dev/rmt/0 status
/dev/rmt/0: no tape loaded or drive offline

if there is not . However when there is a tape , but it has been set
read only I get the same output from mt as I get when it is writeable.

Is there a simple way to check whether or not the tape is writeable
without actually trying to write something to it ?

Thanks

Niall

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