Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[8-bit]

Have you ever noticed that Puppy only comes with e2fsck and all the other linux filesystem checkers for ext3 and ext4 are just links to fsck.ext2?

Well, somewhere I had downloaded an image of Ubuntu-9.04.ext3.1gb.fs.
I added a 3fs extension to it and was able to mount it.
There I found "fsck.ext2, fsck.ext3. fsck.ext4, fsck.ext4dev, and fsck.minix".

I am running Puppy Lucid 5.20 and got brave and tried running fsck.ext2 on an old pupsave.2fs file.
It did a 5 part check and I had never seen that with Puppy.
So are we missing out?

If you want to try them on an old pupsave, I am attaching them.
To use, "#./fsck.ext2 -y /path/pupsave.2fs".
Remove the "-y" if you do not want automatic repairs.

[rjbrewer]

8-bit;

This is what comes with Puppy (Wary in this case).
(typed fsck in pfind)
How does it differ after using your tip?

[amigo]

fsck.ext3. fsck.ext4 and fsck.ext4dev are commonly either links to fsck.ext2 or are wrappers which call fsck.ext2. This is beacuse fsck.ext2 is multi-call binary -it behaves differently depending on what it is called. Some distros may leave the programs just like the sources install them -which is that they are all hard-links sharing the same inode. If the installation or package-creation process simply *copies* them into the directory, then they each become a separate binary -exactly identical to each of the others. That is a waste of space. If they remain as hardlinks, then they will show as having the original size -that is, one inode will be counted four time -so it lloks like the package needs more space than it really does.

The fsck 'programs' for fat, vfat etc, are sually just a tiny wrapper which runs the command 'true'. Which means that they do nothing. There are no linux/unix tools for fat/vfat/ntfs fs maintenance or defragging.

If the other distro tools are doing more, it is because they are using the *real* tools and not cut-down busybox versions. Damned busybox strikes again... So now, the puppy solution would be to install the real tool naming fsck-full, change the name of the busybox link to fsck-bb and then create a slow shell wrapper named fsck, which intercepts any calls to fsck, does some perverse guessing to figure out what the user really wants, and then run either the 'full' version or the busybox version according to that guess...

[alienjeff]

[L18L]