SCRATCH FILE [for fsck]

[John F. Haugh II]

In article <574 at vector.UUCP> chip at vector.UUCP (Chip Rosenthal) writes:
>In article <88 at infopro.UUCP> david at infopro.UUCP (David Fiedler) writes:
>>From article <7188 at well.UUCP>, by dave at well.UUCP (Dave Hughes):
>>> How can I get [fsck] to automatically get past the prompt for a SCRATCHFILE
>>How about changing the appropriate entry in /etc/default/filesys to add
>>something like "-t /tmp/scratch"?
>
>Be careful.  This won't work when you fsck the filesystem which contains
>/tmp/scratch.  Assuming that /tmp isn't a seperate filesytem and your
>root filesystem isn't large, then /tmp/scratch will work.  Otherwise, a
>better way would be to create a small device with divvy called /dev/scratch
>and use that instead.

what about the RAM disks?  you can use one of the non-lingering RAM
disks for this function.

the manual describes how to create the device node for a ram disk of
the desired size and lifetime.  you don't want one of the "forever"
ramdisks since you presumably want the memory when fsck is done with it ...

>                       Unfortunately, I don't remember how large this

i believe a good rule of thumb is 1K (two xenix blocks) per MB.  this
changes if you have a large number of inodes in the file system, such as
a news partition might have.
-- 
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