use Perl

Symptoms: Upgraded to Fedora Core 2 and/or linux kernel 2.6 or better. CD recording to IDE CD's using cdrecord is now broken. CDs burn fine, but throw I/O Error at the end of the CD. An md5sum never quite matches, and a dd back to disk results in an .iso file slightly smaller than the original.

Fixes: Add -dao flag (very important for burning .iso files, and nobody seems to say this ever). Change dev=x,y,z (SCSI format) to /dev/hdx (IDE , i.e. rational format). Note that IDE-SCSI is no longer useful under kernel 2.6, so make sure that's not in modules.conf and its kin. Make sure you have your distro's current cdrecord .rpm or the like. Burning the CDs either root or setuid=0 seems to help also.

Amazingly, google has a hard time answering this question, so I'm dumping this in to see if I can help grease the skids.

Notable non-fixes: downloading the "real" cdrecord package from Mr. Schilling's website. Probably any usenet or mailing list discussion about cdrecord, they all seem to fall back to arguments about Mr. Schilling's strongly held opinions. Asking google (which in this case is poisoned by the above arguments).

I can't tell if the strongly held opinions are valid or not, they just were unhelpful to my personal situation. And I'm not sure I care... I had some .iso files to burn into CDs. Some of the opinions in general (i.e. the 2.6 kernel is broken, GNU make is broken, thus-and-so libraries are broken) do make me wonder, but I digress :-)