find issue led to possible fsck bug

Scot L. Harris webid at cfl.rr.com
Wed May 3 02:27:32 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 22:12 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> 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?

Actually, that would explain why when he ran fsck from boot (/forcefsck)
it did not report any problems.

So it sounds like fsck reports incorrect info if run on a mounted file
system.  And find does not like pseudo file systems.

Is there a way to exclude the pseudo file systems from find?  I have
been looking at using -prune but that does not appear to work.






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