Corruption

[Rick Stevens]

J.L. Coenders wrote:
> Hi,
> Does anyone know how to check for corrupt files/disks, etc.? 
> I have some issues archiving my Mail directory (see subject: Tar/Zip/Rar 
> trouble) and am wondering if anyone knows how to check this?

There's no way to check for corrupt files because there's no way to
know what's supposed to be in the file in the first place.  The only
way to detect corruption is to run some sort of checksum on them each
time they change, and run the same checksum and see if the results
match.  A good tool for that is "md5sum" (which is used by the installer
to verify that the CDROMs are burned correctly).

Filesystems can be checked for _consistancy_ (structural soundness) by
use of "fsck" before the filesystem is mounted, but it can't detect
file corruption.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-           Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.            -
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