Capturing output from format

Ever need to obtain the contents of the format command for other processing in a shell or Perl script? It's fairly simple to do, but the command's behavior is a bit counter-intuitive and makes for an interesting case.

When you run the format command it lists the disks, then issues a prompt asking you to select one of the enumerated devices. It does not provide an option for existing the command at that point. So, we need to appease this interface oddity by passing a "0" to the command, which will arbitraily select the first disk from the list. This should work in any case excepting a diskless client.

The format command looks for its input from a file descriptor known as STDIN, or standard input. The way we queue up entries in STDIN is using the good old echo command. Altogether it looks like this:

root@testbox# /usr/bin/echo 0 | /usr/sbin/format
Searching for disks...

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c1t0d0
/pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0,2/LSILogic,sas@2/sd@0,0
1. c1t1d0
/pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0,2/LSILogic,sas@2/sd@1,0

Specify disk (enter its number): selecting c1t0d0
[disk formatted]
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0 is part of SVM volume stripe:d10. Please see metaclear(1M).
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1 is part of SVM volume stripe:d11. Please see metaclear(1M).
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s5 is part of SVM volume stripe:d15. Please see metaclear(1M).
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s7 contains an SVM mdb. Please see metadb(1M).

FORMAT MENU:
disk - select a disk
type - select (define) a disk type
partition - select (define) a partition table
current - describe the current disk
format - format and analyze the disk
repair - repair a defective sector
label - write label to the disk
analyze - surface analysis
defect - defect list management
backup - search for backup labels
verify - read and display labels
save - save new disk/partition definitions
inquiry - show vendor, product and revision
volname - set 8-character volume name
! - execute , then return
quit
format>
root@testbox#



The problem with this is it captured more than we want in the output. We don't need a menu, and we don't need to know about selecting c1t0d0 since that's already enumerated in the first disk list. To edit this stream of test, we'll need a stream editor... Can you guess what it's called? Sed. Let's modify the command to squelch out some of the noise.

root@testbox# /usr/bin/echo 0 | /usr/sbin/format 2>&1 | sed -e '/^Specify disk/,$d'

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c1t0d0
/pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0,2/LSILogic,sas@2/sd@0,0
1. c1t1d0
/pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0,2/LSILogic,sas@2/sd@1,0

root@testbox#


That's better!