Working with disks, tapes, and CD-ROMs

Default devices

Many commands, such as format(C) and tar(C), have a default device, which is accessed automatically whenever you invoke the command without specifying a device. This default device is listed in the files in the directory /etc/default. The file /etc/default/format, for example, which specifies the default device used by the format command, contains the following:

   #	@(#) format135 23.2 91/08/29
   .
   .
   .
   VERIFY=Y
   DEVICE=/dev/rfd096ds15

Here, the default device is the floppy disk drive /dev/rfd096ds15. The VERIFY line indicates that floppy disks are to be verified after they are formatted, to ensure that the process was successful.