FSCKing a RO partition

[Rick C. Petty]

On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 01:01:45PM +0100, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> 
> Personally, when I enter single-user mode and need to
> mount any partition for writing, "fsck -p" is always the
> first thing I type.  It's hardcoded into my fingers (and
> should be for every admin), so there's nothing to remember
> either.  :-)

Not sure I agree 100%.  This has bitten me a few times on a fileserver with
terabytes of disk space.  I don't want to wait for the preen to finish,
although moving it to the background is a possibility...  often I just want
to fix /etc/fstab using vi, so it requires me to "preen" /, /usr, and /var
(to prevent the annoying messages).  I don't get into a habit of starting
a long-running process when I'm in a hurry to get a fileserver back up.

Aside from fixing the "mount -u -r /" bug, I guess I would be happy if you
could preen a particular file system, e.g. "fsck -p /usr".  I'm surprised
no one's added this before.  Also what would be nice if there was an "-a"
option to specify all auto-mounted filesystems, so I could do:  "fsck -ya"
if I wanted.  Maybe I'll look into adding these when I have time.  fsck
used to be an easier program before background checks were added...

-- Rick C. Petty