fsck!

[Brett Glass]

At 06:43 PM 6/27/2003, Kris Kennaway wrote:

>You're supposed to boot into single-user mode to repair the
>filesystems before attempting to bring it up to multiuser state.

Ah... but you're not there at the exact moment when the power
comes back on. (Maybe it was just a flicker and there was no
UPS, or maybe the power company -- like ours -- is so slow to
fix outages that the UPS battery was fully drained.)

What's more, even if you CAN boot into single user mode and run 
fsck, it can be frustrating. Sometimes a partition takes two
or three passes to clean up. Sometimes fsck randomly refuses
to work on one. It's a mess.

Ideally, the system would handle the logistics. It's not as if
powering down without shutting down is that rare of an 
occurrence. (It eats holes in any system, and is responsible for
gradual "bit rot" in both Windows machines and BSD machines.)

--Brett