Jon LaBadie wrote:

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 06:43:12AM -0800, Yan Seiner wrote:

I am using a VXA-1 tape drive.

I've been testing

mt -f /dev/nst0 load

which appears to work, returning 0 if the tape is loaded and 2 if it is not....

On a request like this it would be good to know the
OS you are using as different OS's have different tools.

I would consider mt "status" rather than "load".
You might even want to rewind before dumping.

The mt man pages on Solaris and SuSE say:

 EXIT STATUS
    0     All operations were successful.

    1     Command was unrecognized or mt was unable to open  the
          specified tape drive.

    2     An operation failed.


So nearly any mt action seems like a good choice.

OK, that's what my man page says too....  status returns

[root@tooth yan]#  mt -f /dev/nst0 status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 1024 bytes. Density code 0x80 (DLT 15GB uncomp. or Ecrix).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (41010000):
BOT ONLINE IM_REP_EN

and after ejecting

[root@tooth yan]#  mt -f /dev/nst0 status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=-1, block number=-1, partition=0.
Tape block size 0 bytes. Density code 0x0 (default).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (50000):
DR_OPEN IM_REP_EN

--Yan