topic Re: FSCK in Operating System - HP-UX

FSCK

Matthew Couper — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:16:34 GMT

I was asked to praise the person who created the fsck program, a teacher once said the creator deserves the noble peace prize. Does HP offer any information about the person/group of people that create a particular program?

Matt

Re: FSCK

Arunvijai_4 — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 23:03:43 GMT

Nope, I dont think HP will offer any infos regarding the author of the program. You can get these information for Opensource utilities like GCC, GDB, etc...

-Arun

Re: FSCK

Michael Schulte zur Sur — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 15:40:35 GMT

Hi,

I did a search with "author of fsck" and a Dr. McKusick popped up several times. May be he is one of the group of the Berkely university that devleoped unix.

greetings,

Michael

Re: FSCK

Bill Hassell — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 10:27:06 GMT

fsck was first developed in parallel with the McKusick fast file system (known as HFS for HP-UX). It was designed to correct logical errors in directories and block allocation tables, common during the development of the file system design and also common when the computers are powered off or rebooted without proper filesystem closure.

As other filesystems were designed (ie, VxFS), fsck was rewritten to fix similar problems in other filesystems. VxFS was designed with a more robust method in tracking empty space and updating directories and thus fsck's job is much simpler (and faster) with VxFS filesystems. fsck continues to be modified and enhanced by various vendors on virtually all Unix platforms.

The one thing that fsck cannot do is to fix hardware problems. When the disk cannot read the data, regardless of whether the errors are in directories, file tables or directories, fsck cannot fix these failures. So the need for regular (and tested) backups, regular patching and good power protection is always a requirement.