I hate to bitch but bitch I must

[Jerry McAllister]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 05:54:23PM -0400, PJ wrote:

> Why is it that the manual pages, as thorough as they may be, are very,
> very confusing.
> Perhaps I am being too wary, but I find that too many 
> instructions/examples are stumbling blocks to appreciation of the whole
> system:
> for instance, let's look at the instructions for changing disk labels
> with glabel or is it tunefs ?
> man glabel(8):
> 
> for UFS the file system label is set with
> tunefs(8)
> <http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tunefs&sektion=8&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+7.2-RELEASE>.
> what happened to glabel?
> man tunefs(8)
> The *tunefs* utility cannot be
> run on an active file system. To change an active file system, it must
> be downgraded to read-only or unmounted.
> 
> So, you have to run tunefs from an active file system to modify another
> disk?

No, it clearly says tunefs CANNOT be run on an active filesystem.

Then it says, in order to change an active file system you have to first
make it a NOT active filesystem - eg make it read-only or just unmount it.  

> but from man tunefs:
> BUGS
> This utility should work on active file systems.
> What in hades does this mean--just above it says cannot be run on active
> file systems. ???

That means it is a BUG that it won't work on an active files system - eg 
that someone should fix this defficiency and make it so it will work
on an active filesystem.  The man writer thinks it 'should' be able to
work that way.

////jerry  
   
>  To change the root file
> system, the system must be rebooted after the file system is tuned.
> 
> You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish.
> How cute... And fish eat bugs.
>