*BSD News Article 21645


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!acsc.com!acsc.com!jerry
From: jerry@acsc.com (Jerry Chen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: what is fs_clean for?
Date: 30 Sep 1993 00:45:26 GMT
Organization: Advanced Computing Systems Company
Lines: 15
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <28da76$fhf@acsc.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cpuserver.acsc.com

In the superblock of UFS, there are two fields:

ufs/fs.h:       char    fs_clean;               /* file system is clean flag */
ufs/fs.h:       long    fs_state;               /* validate fs_clean field */

My guess is that they are used to determine if the file system is clean, ie, umounted
successfully.  And if the file system is clean, we do not need to fsck it since
life is too short to always run fsck.

Well, my guess must be wrong.  I grep the files under usr/src/sbin/fsck and 
usr/src/sys.386bsd/ufs and it seems to me that fs_clean is not used (other than
copied to altsblock.fs_clean) at all.  Does the BSD always run fsck?  Why is it?
Thanks in advance for the answer.
 
Jerry JyhRen Chen