fsck strangeness

[Ian Smith]

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007, Karol Kwiatkowski wrote:
 > Ian Smith wrote:
 > > On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Chris wrote:
 > >  > If its bad to run fsck on a mounted read,write then why does
 > >  > background fsck do it? or you talking about foreground fsck only?
 > > 
 > > Well I was referring to foreground fsck, and I still don't know why
 > > running it on a mounted fs is 'bad' when fsck runs in 'NO WRITE' mode
 > > anyway when it finds a fs is mounted, hence my query above.
 > 
 > Here's my understanding:
 > 
 > Mounted fs (rw) isn't in stable state, there may be some writes to it -
 > daemons, buffers flushes, etc. In this condition fsck can report
 > inconsistency. And fsck running in 'NO WRITE' won't help anyway :)

a) Absolutely.

b) Indeed it usually does, fairly consistently, especially on /var.

c) No it won't help (except where it can help locate problems in a real 
mess like bad blocks), but the assertion in question was, can it hurt?

Cheers, Ian