Hi, I occured to similar situation with Mr. Thomas Diesler in message 00876 on this list.
http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg00876.html I'm using a backup tool "pdumpfs", takes and maintains everyday snapshots of target directories by copying it (updated or newly created files) and making hard links (unchanged files). (http://www.namazu.org/~satoru/pdumpfs/index.html.en) I have enjoyed it and happily taken snapshots of whole tree of my Linux web/mail/db server everyday for this 7 months. Then, the filesystem of my backup drive has corrupted. That is, when I tried to delete some largest files after backed them up to CD-R, the drive space still not freed, after I removed all of the links of those files. And fsck returned error code and could not repair the filesystem (ext3). I decided to rescue "all" the filetree, but the tools for this purpose are very limited. For tar, it could not handle hardlinks correctly (as far as I read the man pages). For dump and restore, they could dump and restore the corrupted filesystem faithfully. Only the tool I could use was "cp -a", for handling capability of hardlinks and it preserves all attributes. The filesystem cotains about 200day's snapshots of my whole system include mirrored indexed "web cache", so thousands (How I could get the number?) of files (mostly hardlinks) and directory entries are in each day's dir. My command was: cp -a /backup/2003/* /backup2/2003 The box was stopped after about 3 hours, kernel was running (virtual terminals switchable) but I could not logged in, for a message continuously repeated that killing an process of httpd. I judged that the kernel could not start new processes and it runnawayed (no Ctrl-Alt-Del valid). After hard-reset and rebooted, the copy was done about 4 days of backups. Then I rerun the command and observed it on top(1). It revealed that the process growed up and exceeded the memory space on the system (386MB RAM + 128MB swap). I added swap files some time and when the process reach to 3GB, it left message "memory exhausted" and stopped. I thought it could be a memory leakage or design flaw. I searched Google and come across the above messages. I think this is worth to be reported, isn't it...? KAMOSAWA Masao _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
