*BSD News Article 50038


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!newsroom.utas.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!hpg30a.csc.cuhk.hk!news.hklink.net!uunet!in2.uu.net!news.sprintlink.net!sundog.tiac.net!cgull
From: cgull@smoke.marlboro.vt.us (john hood)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD2.0 Clean Flag in Superblock
Date: 27 Aug 1995 02:33:27 GMT
Organization: The Internet Access Company
Lines: 19
Message-ID: <41olhn$9sj@sundog.tiac.net>
References: <41bl3c$81q@mippet.ci.com.au> <41d905$35v@blob.best.net> <41e49a$3lm@reason.cdrom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: smoke.marlboro.vt.us

In article <41e49a$3lm@reason.cdrom.com>,
Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>dillon@best.com (Matt Dillon) wrote:
>>    I've never quite understood why that fsck is in there.  At best you
>>    would get information on the fragmentation on the drive out of it.
>
>Neither did we, which is why that fsck is no longer in there... :-)

It's fairly obvious to me: it's a sanity check for systems with long
uptimes or unstable software.  If you see a file system getting weird
you can perhaps catch it and fix it before it gets completely trashed.

That's why I put it back in, on my system.

It does require that whoever reads the resulting mail be able to tell
the difference between real problems, and fsck's normal nit-picking
and other lint when it checks active file systems.

  --john hood