Suppressing/skipping C:Format confirmation

[amigavision]

For context, we are the maintainers of the open source AmigaVision project, a script that will take a set of WHDL files and generates the ultimate Amiga game and demo scene setup. It started out as a project for MiSTer FPGA, but we have since added support for original hardware, Analogue Pocket and MiST FPGAs, as well as the beginnings of emulator support. (More in the link if you’re interested, including nerdy details on Pixel Aspect Ratios and Dynamic Crop)

As part of the script, we format a couple of PFS hard disk images, and we have managed to get the process to work without user input in general, but we still need the user to confirm that they want to do this when running C:Format.

Does anyone know if there’s a hidden argument we could pass to skip this? (It’s certainly not documented, we looked!)

Or maybe someone has disassembled the C:Format command and removed the check? Or are there tools on e.g. Aminet that could fulfill the same function?

Any help and pointers appreciated!

[Snoopy1234]

An alternative Format utility might have available arguments to pass conformation?

http://aminet.net/search?query=+disk+Format

[amigavision]

Yeah, we did look into most of those, but couldn’t find anything that would do what we wanted.

[Snoopy1234]

Format >:NIL Drive DF0: Name "Test" suppresses the requester but still requires a carriage return entered which might be done with some other switch or command...

[amigavision]

Indeed, requiring input is the problem we are trying to work around.

[meynaf]

So basically what you want is a solution to skip the user pressing return to confirm the format ?
If so, create a dummy file in ram: that only contains single line feed, and use that to redirect input of the Format command.

Here tested with rad:, it could format without confirmation :

echo "" >ram:1
c:format drive rad: name toto quick <ram:1

[thomas]

You don't need a file. <nil: will also suppress the confirmation.

[amigavision]

Thanks! Should have remembered that one, have used it in the past

[amigavision]

For the record, the <ram:1 approach worked, the <NIL: did not — at least in this particular case.

[Snoopy1234]

Originally Posted by amigavision

For the record, the <ram:1 approach worked, the <NIL: did not — at least in this particular case.

Although I thought of >:NIL as a null statement and I get confused by semantics eg >NIL: in this case <NIL: works as a NOREQS carriage-return on my OS 3.9 A1200. It's interesting that the COPY command has NOREQS as a switch option but Format doesn't. Also I found the switch \r is a common suffix across multiple platforms as a carriage-return alternative. In this case; the idea I had was Format >:NIL \r but that seems to kill the project; as it does complete - but Format doesn't do anything..... So. Thanks for such a simple mind-shift.