Checking for inserted floppy

[Grégoire Sutre <gregoire.sutre%labri.fr@localhost>]

Hi,

I would like to programmatically check whether a floppy is inserted in a 
floppy drive.  Or, to quickly abort a read attempts from a floppy device 
when the floppy drive is empty.  Is this possible from userland?

Currently, doing e.g. cat /dev/fd0a (or cat /dev/rfd0a) results in a 
loop of timeout errors (I did not wait until termination of the loop, 
but it's at least 30s), and it loads the system pretty hard (i.e. the 
system seems almost non-responsive).

Thanks for your help,

Grégoire

p.s. A similar problem was reported in october 2003:
     http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-help/2003/10/15/0000.html