fsck errors and a lot of files in /lost+found

[Jonathan S Billings]

On 11/23/2010 07:46 AM, Mertens, Bram wrote:
> I asked a similar question to this a while ago.  And while I
> understand the argument about "lost+found" means that fsck doesn't
> know where to put the files I don't understand why the inode number
> of the file is known but the name and path aren't.

An inode doesn't include file name or path, that's what's defined by the 
directory entry for that file.  This is why you can have a *hard* link 
to the same inode, but the two or more links have different names and/or 
paths.

When a directory is damaged, you lose that file name and path data. 
Fsck creates a directory entry in lost+found to refer to the inodes that 
have been orphaned, and names them with their inode name, since there 
are no other data available.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <jsbillin at umich.edu>
College of Engineering - CAEN - Unix and Linux Support