T.D., On Monday 06 June 2005 18:45, Daniel Sheppeard wrote:

Linux newbie freaking out.

Welcome, oh green one.

I received this warning while performing a 'find': WARNING: Hard link count is wrong for ./proc/1/task: this may be a bug in your filesystem driver. Automatically turning on find's -noleaf option. Earlier results may have failed to include directories that should have been searched.

There's nothing to worry about. For starters, the directories and files in and under "/proc" are not really files. That is, they don't live on a disk like you email or MP3 collection. That whole hierarchy is synthesized by the kernel to provide a kind of introspective view of the current state of processes running on your system. As such, it's in constant flux as processes start and end and as they open and close files and do all the other things that running programs do. Find apparently does not have any special knowledge of the special character of the /proc file system (it's not the first time we've seen such a problem, another being file systems mounted automatically when removable media is inserted--that problem seems to have been fixed in the latest release). For what it's worth, I just replicated the symptom you report on my system, and it's perfectly healthy. Offhand, I don't know why the link count on /proc/1/task would be one too high, but it probably has something to do with the extra special nature of the process with ID 1: It is called "/etc/init" and it's the ancestor of all processes created on a Unix or Linux system.

Can anyone tell a poor newbie what this means and what I should do about it? (running 9.3 on a refurbished HP with a Celeron processor).

Well, panicing is one option, but the one I'd recommend is to ignore it completely. I don't think it'll go away and I don't think it's actually a sign of anything abnormal.

T. Daniel

Randall Schulz