On Mon, 7 Apr 1997, Jon Ribbens wrote:

> Jim Reid <jim@mpn.cp.philips.com> wrote:
> > Personally, I prefer O'Reilly's set of the BSD manuals. If you're a
> > novice to UNIX sysadmin,
> 
> I don't think I'm a novice anymore. I've learnt by experience,
> though, and since disks don't die very often, I don't have much
> experience with dealing with that.
> 
well, I would then consider this all as some 'experience' with this.

> I worked that much out by myself ;-). What it doesn't tell you
> is what it actually *means*. I think an 'explain' button would be
> rather useful at the yes/no prompts.
> 
sure, would you like a GUI by default too? How about a filesystem that is too
stupid to care if it just gets turned off? Wait! Why don't you try a Microsoft
product?

> > I suppose so, if you like chatty programs. OTOH, if you think like a
> > moron - I'm not suggesting you are - fsck *very* helpful. It could
> > hardly be more helpful.
> 
> It just seems perverse to use abbreviations like "BLKS" for "blocks".
> They add a bit of obfuscation for absolutely no gain. And even
> a single line for each message saying what will actually *happen*
> if you say yes or no (e.g. "this will lose the data contained
> within the named file") would be nice.
> 
Please pardon the operating system for assuming that people with some 
semblance of a clue are administrating the system...

> It didn't mention anything about corrupted directories though.
> The files it asked whether to remove on the first run it re-created
> on the second. (The files match up.) I don't trust it, personally,
> since it destroyed our 2GB disk the other week (minor corruption,
> run fsck -> no data left).
> 
Don't forget, a directory has an inode liek everything else. Once it fixes that,
the next pass of fsck reports more damage...trust us, it's a feature.

rob

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