• 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️
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    11 months ago

    I first heard about this command from my dad when I told him I was installing Linux the first time and he told a joke that I don’t remember the whole setup or anything but the punchline was that if you have to use FSCK, you’re FUCKED since most of the time it wouldn’t find a problem and if it did, it would end up erasing the whole disk.

    My experience with it wasn’t so dire. I actually never had any issues using it as it was meant, so I never really understood where the joke came from other than maybe just the spelling of the command.

    • aard
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      211 months ago

      Back in 2001 we got ext3, adding journaling to the most widely used filesystem on Linux - which can just roll back transaction on next mount, while previously you’d have to run fsck to get your filesystem back to a consistent state.

      A non-journaling filesystem was easier to get into a state where things were broken in interesting ways, as a unclean unmount had a higher chance of impacting critical data.

      In the early days of journaling filesystems fsck was also quite lacking - so when things got bad enough that you did need fsck there was a decent chance you’d end up in trouble.

      Nowadays both robustness of the file systems as well as quality of fsck have greatly improved.