On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

# On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Luke Mewburn wrote:
# > Modified Files:
# > 	basesrc/sbin/fsirand: fsirand.8 fsirand.c
# >
# > Log Message:
# > - add -F - manipulate a file system image in a regular file (instead of
# >   a special device).
#
# I see this -F added to ~all filesystem utilities. Is that really
# necessary? IIRC there's the Unix philosophy of "everything is a file", so
# why is there a difference when giving a filename over /dev/somedisk?
# Can't the fools be at least made auto-detect if th eunderlying thing is a
# disk image over a real disk?

Not to mention, don't you usually run things like fsck etc. on things
that have been vnconfig'd?  Why not just run the fsirand there?

WRT auto-detect:  I seem to recall having been able to run newfs/mkfs
on a regular file in the past on other operating systems, with a warning
printed at create time:

WARNING: "image.fs" is not a character special file; continue (y/n)?

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD:  Flying into the heart of the Sun.  And the i386, and Alpha, and
	Mac, and PowerPC, and...