find issue led to possible fsck bug

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Tue, 2 May 2006, Scot L. Harris wrote:

> On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 20:49 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
>
>> Is /selinux even a real file system?  All the files have size 0 and time
>> equal to the time of last boot, and it doesn't appear in /etc/fstab.
>> That looks suspiciously like a pseudo-filesystem like /sys and /proc.
>> fsck doesn't work on those.  I don't think that find does either.
>
> Now that is an interesting idea.  How do you tell the difference?

I'm sure there's a better way, but I think if you boot with a rescue disk, 
the contents of pseudo-filesystems in /mnt/sysimage (where your disk 
partitions get mounted) will be empty.

>
> That would explain the find error.  But what about the fsck problems?

I'd guess that, because pseudo-filesystems get recreated at boot, they 
will recreate the same apparent errors.  Because they aren't really on 
disk, they may operate correctly without being in an apparently consistent 
state.  You can't unmount them, and you are always warned against running 
fsck against a mounted filesystem.

Note that I'm not in any sense an expert on this aspect of *nix.  Maybe 
somebody who knows more would care to weigh in?


-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs