[ale] lost+found
Daniel S Cox
danny at ecweb.com
Thu Oct 29 13:41:48 EST 1998
Ben,
If you have the Edition VII (yeah, I'm showing my age) documents, one of
the articles in there explains what it's all about.
The skinny: when fsck runs, and happens to find an unattached file (an
inode entry that points to valid data and everything, but has no directory
entry), it'll put it in lost+found. Since a directory is
'just-another-file' (at least to the file system), if there isn't room, it
would have to allocate a new block from the free list. Well, if you're in
the middle of repairing the file system, this is a Bad Thing (TM). So,
when the file system is created, lost+found is also created, and expanded
(by creating several dozen files, and then removing them). Then, if fsck
must re-attach a file, it just enters the name and inode number in the
lost+found directory.
Clear as mud?
Danny
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