*BSD News Article 84978


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From: kyle_jones@wonderworks.com (Kyle Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.smail,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Sendmail vs. Smail...
Date: 14 Dec 1996 21:52:06 -0500
Organization: Wonderworks Inc.
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References: <57tf61$gq7@raven.eva.net> <58j08h$1mn@nntp1.best.com> <58k95h$s3b@crystal.WonderWorks.COM> <58vis8$pcf@samba.rahul.net>
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 > > But a separate partition is a win if your system crashes.
 > > All these strange files appear in lost+found.  It's much
 > > easier to write a program to relink the files into the right
 > > directories when you know that all of them are related to
 > > the mail system.  I've automated this task, and it would
 > > have been impossible to do the job completely without mqueue
 > > being a separate partition.
 > 
 > My assumption has always been that orphaned files recovered by
 > fsck are all opened-and-unlinked temp files, and there is not
 > much that you can do with them after recovery.

The question is whether the files were unlinked by an application
or unlinked in the process of the operating system running amok.
All it takes is some bad data to be written into some directory
blocks.  Given that I have found whole directories in lost+found,
after some bad crashes, I can't believe that tempfiles are always
the answer.