/etc/cleanup bug! (was Re: Another fdisk partition for 386/ix.)

[John Macdonald]

In article <479 at hades.OZ> greyham at hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) writes:
|in article <4339 at dell.dell.com>, jrh at mustang.dell.com (jrh) says:
|% The /lost+found directory is probably there when you originally install, the
|% problem is the shell script /etc/cleanup has a nasty bug in it.  They have
|% a line which reads:
|% 
|% find /lost+found -mtime 14 -exec rm -rf {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1
|% 
|% This is loaded in crontab to be executed every Sunday morning by default.
|% The problem is, if /lost+found has not had it's modification time changed 
|% in 14 days, the entire subdirectory is removed.
|.
|.
|.
|% Next, modify /etc/cleanup to fix the problem permanently.  The easiest is
|% to insert a line with:
|% 
|% touch /lost+found
|% 
|% before the 'find' command above, should clear it up...
|
|How about changing that line to:
|find /lost+found -type f -mtime 14 -exec rm -rf {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1
|                 ^^^^^^^
|
|since lost+found is a directory, it won't get nuked, and if there's anything
|other than regular files in lost+found, they won't get nuked either.

It would be better yet to just get rid of that line.  The -mtime 14 term
does not mean that the file must be in lost+found for at least 14 days
before it gets turfed - it can be deleted during the same bootup sequence
that runs the fsck and puts the file into lost+found, since fsck does not
change mtime when it does so.  Thus, if an important group of files have
their directory entries corrupted (i.e. one sector of a directory got
trashed), and they all get put into lost+found, then onlt the ones that
have been modified in the last two weeks will survive the find/rm command.

It is not nice to delete files before the sysadmin has a chance to recover
them.

It would be better, as an alternative, to simply test for any files in
lost+found and if there are any to send mail to root or to a list of
locally capable people.
-- 
80386 - hardware demonstrating the fractal nature of warts.   | John Macdonald
EMS/LIM - software demonstrating the fractal nature of warts. |   jmm at eci386