fsck in the background

[RW]

On Wednesday 26 July 2006 02:03, Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (Jul 25), Michael P. Soulier said:
> > A while ago there was a power failure in my house, long enough to
> > wear down the UPS. I had to power-on my server when I got home
> > (crappy bios), and I noticed after I logged-in that fsck was running
> > non-interactively in the background.
> >
> > Question: If it finds problems that require administrator
> > intervention, how does it tell me if it's running in the background?
>
> It logs an error to syslog, and the next time you reboot it forces a
> foreground check so it can prompt you for instructions.

Although to the best of my knowledge, I've never actually seen that happen. 

What I see is usually the background check works, occasionally the preliminary 
fsck -F will fail. IIRC that leaves me in single user mode, with instructions 
to fsck the partition manually.