I've written a small shell script for doing backup that uses mkisofs and cdrecord. I haven't been able to construct the script as a pipe because cdrecord, it seems, needs to know the length of the track it's writing (for a DVD, at least). So if there's no DVD in the drive, mkisofs will spend some time creating an image and then cdrecord will bomb out. I'm looking for a command-line method of testing if a drive has a blank DVD in it. I can check if the drive is mounted using a combination of "mount" and "grep", but you can mount a drive even if there's no media in it, and that method doesn't distinguish between a blank DVD in the drive (good) and no DVD in the drive (bad). As far as I can tell, cdrecord itself has no way of testing for the presence of a blank DVD without actually attempting to write it. So does anyone know a command that I can put into a shell-script test to see if the drive does or does not have a blank DVD? Paul