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e2fsck -y says "yes" to "Abort?"

DISCUSSION Eric Sandeen 4 participants 6 messages Apr 18, 2009 – Apr 20, 2009

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#0 lore raw

I've got this bug filed against Fedora:

Bug 484913 - Change verbage of e2fsck questioning to make the "-y" switch more useful

and I think he has a point:

sh-3.2# e2fsck -y /dev/VolGroup00/VolVol02
e2fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
The filesystem size (according to the superblock) is 14090240 blocks The physical size of the device is 8847360 blocks
Either the superblock or the partition table is likely to be corrupt!

Abort? yes

sh-3.2#

I'm reluctant to invert the logic of the Abort? question as suggested ("Are you sure you want to continue?") because this is a significant enough problem that we probably should really pause for consideration.

But it seems like perhaps stopping at "Abort?", allowing the user to say "n" to that and then let the "-y" flag take over from there would be reasonable.

If this sounds ok I'll whip up a patch, something like a way to flag the really serious questions (?) as unaffected by -y.

Thanks,
-Eric

#1 lore raw
Quoted 14 lines · Eric Sandeen

I've got this bug filed against Fedora:

sh-3.2# e2fsck -y /dev/VolGroup00/VolVol02
e2fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
The filesystem size (according to the superblock) is 14090240 blocks The physical size of the device is 8847360 blocks
Either the superblock or the partition table is likely to be corrupt!

Abort? yes

I'm reluctant to invert the logic of the Abort? question as suggested ("Are you sure you want to continue?") because this is a significant enough problem that we probably should really pause for consideration.

Quoted 6 lines

But it seems like perhaps stopping at "Abort?", allowing the user to say "n" to that and then let the "-y" flag take over from there would be reasonable.

If this sounds ok I'll whip up a patch, something like a way to flag the really serious questions (?) as unaffected by -y.

Seems reasonable to me; we'll have to update the documentation to explain that -y really doesn't mean yes to _all_ questions, but that seems like the best approach.

- Ted

#2 lore raw
Quoted 24 lines · Theodore Tso
Quoted 14 lines · Eric Sandeen

I've got this bug filed against Fedora:

sh-3.2# e2fsck -y /dev/VolGroup00/VolVol02
e2fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
The filesystem size (according to the superblock) is 14090240 blocks The physical size of the device is 8847360 blocks
Either the superblock or the partition table is likely to be corrupt!

Abort? yes

I'm reluctant to invert the logic of the Abort? question as suggested ("Are you sure you want to continue?") because this is a significant enough problem that we probably should really pause for consideration.

Quoted 7 lines

But it seems like perhaps stopping at "Abort?", allowing the user to say "n" to that and then let the "-y" flag take over from there would be reasonable.

If this sounds ok I'll whip up a patch, something like a way to flag the really serious questions (?) as unaffected by -y.

Quoted 7 lines

Seems reasonable to me; we'll have to update the documentation to explain that -y really doesn't mean yes to _all_ questions, but that seems like the best approach.

- Ted
--

The only down side is when you try to automate this (say in an appliance) and you don't have a human reading the output. In this case, you might just want to invert the logic but in general, it does seem dangerous to invert the logic for a long standing option,

Ric

#3 lore raw
Quoted 7 lines · Ric Wheeler

The only down side is when you try to automate this (say in an appliance) and you don't have a human reading the output. In this case, you might just want to invert the logic but in general, it does seem dangerous to invert the logic for a long standing option,

Ric

Maybe make something like "-yy" automatically answer "n" to anything that would stop the fsck, and answer "y" to anything that it proposes fixing?

-Eric

#4 lore raw
Quoted 9 lines · Eric Sandeen
Quoted 5 lines · Ric Wheeler

The only down side is when you try to automate this (say in an appliance) and you don't have a human reading the output. In this case, you might just want to invert the logic but in general, it does seem dangerous to invert the logic for a long standing option,

Ric

Quoted 6 lines

Maybe make something like "-yy" automatically answer "n" to anything that would stop the fsck, and answer "y" to anything that it proposes fixing?

-Eric

That would be useful for scripting users - it is already assumed to be wildly dangerous to run it in "yes" mode I would assume in any case :-)

ric

#5 lore raw
Quoted 7 lines · Ric Wheeler
Quoted 6 lines · Eric Sandeen
Quoted 4 lines · Ric Wheeler

The only down side is when you try to automate this (say in an appliance) and you don't have a human reading the output. In this case, you might just want to invert the logic but in general, it does seem dangerous to invert the logic for a long standing option,

Quoted 6 lines
Quoted 3 lines

Maybe make something like "-yy" automatically answer "n" to anything that would stop the fsck, and answer "y" to anything that it proposes fixing?

That would be useful for scripting users - it is already assumed to be wildly dangerous to run it in "yes" mode I would assume in any case :-)

Well, all of the questions are designed to choose a safe option when run with "-y", and to avoid changing the filesystem when run with "-n".

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.