On Friday 23 January 2004 4:07 pm, Ben Yau wrote:
You're asking if fsck checking the filesystem itself intrusive or not? That's an interesting question. We don't do it because there's no point in it really. It will freak out thinking it's not clean and try to fix it or ask us to fix it. In fact I believe some Solaris versions just won't do it and error out since the FS is mounted . But it is an interesting academic question. I vote that you try it and tell us what happens.
Well, part of what motivated the question was having an experience of doing just that and later having the filesystem go bad. But that's no proof that the fsck was the cause of the degradation; in fact I doubt it just because I can't see how a purely passive operation would introduce errors. The comment about the clean bit shows that an fsck can have an effect, but even that argument doesn't show how it's a harmful effect. I was running the fsck just to confirm that a filesystem I believed to be OK (I had just created it with a "cp -a") was really OK. Admittedly I was being lazy by not unmounting the filesystem, but I couldn't see why I would need to. Paul Abrahams