So glad to see someone else getting the 'you're being an idiot' speach today.
Cheers Don On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 19:44, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 16:52, Douglas Royds wrote: > > I had RTFM (Read The FSCK Manual), but like any good Unix manual, it > > tells you everything you need to know, except what to do! > The exact and precise opposite is actually the case. You must have a > psycho-optical disability and be unable to decode the glyphs. Here is a long > explanation which you might hopefully understand. > > NAME > fsck - check and repair a Linux file system > > No problem here I hope? > Remember that the name of the executable file is the command. > It's "fsck" in this case and that is what you type on the keyboard for bash to > interpret. ( I have had a student who did not know this fact and it was > several lessons before I realised that what has been second-nature to me for > about 30 years was in fact unknown for this poor individual. ) > > SYNOPSIS > WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn] > synopsis > n : a sketchy summary of the main points of an argument or theory > > fsck [ -sACVRTNP ] [ -t fstype ] [filesys ... ] [--] [ fs-specific-options ] > > What the manual page is saying here is:- "Type the name followed by some of > the options from the first block delimited by the square brackets". You > interpret this to mean that everything between the '[' and the ']' is > optional, because that is what the [] characters mean. You can read from the > OPTIONS part of the page what each option flag does. So translating the [ -t > fstype ] hieroglyph this means: "Optionally type in the kind of filesystem > you wish to check." It's optional because fsck can usually work out the kind, > or type, of the filesystem for itself. Now for the "[filesys ... ]" bit. > Looking below in the DESCRIPTION part of the man page you will find the > following sentence:- > "filesys can be a device name (e.g. /dev/hdc1, /dev/sdb2), a mount point > (e.g. /, /usr, /home), or an ext2 label or UUID specifier (e.g. > UUID=8868abf6-88c5-4a83-98b8-bfc24057f7bd or LABEL=root)". > > For 99% of us running Linux on one disk this means /dev/hdaX where X is the > number of the partition in question. > Now we come to '[--]'. This double dash means: "Tell bash to stop collecting > options from the command line for the program mentioned at the start of the > line, and send the rest of the line to any program which might be spawed by > fsck". > Continue to decode the glyphs on the OPTIONS section where you will find > descriptions of the various option flag characters. For fsck it's these > ones:- '[ -sACVRTNP ]' > > BUGS: > 1) The SYNOPSIS says:- '-t fstype' whereas the OPTIONS say '-t fslist'. They > should be the same. > 2) The manual page for man is hopeless, because it uses the man page paradigm > without explaining what it is all about. I'll see if I can get a rewrite > accepted. > > Note that you cannot use fsck to check an XFS filesystem. XFS has it's own set > of utilities.
