Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!ecicrl!ecijmm!jmm
From: jmm@ecijmm.UUCP (John Macdonald)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: 3b1 startup: I CAN'T BELIEVE at&t was really this stupid!
Keywords: destructive cleanup
Message-ID: <293@ecijmm.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jul 89 03:30:50 GMT
References: <1989Jul5.151150.25280@eci386.uucp> <1640@sialis.mn.org>
Reply-To: jmm@ecijmm.UUCP (John Macdonald)
Organization: R. H. Lathwell Associates, Elegant Communications, Inc.
Lines: 64

In article <1640@sialis.mn.org> rjg@sialis.mn.org (Robert J. Granvin) writes:
>>2. There is a find procedure to clean out the lost+found directory.
>>(This may be commented out by default, it certainly is here.)  The

   ^----- Remember this bit. --------------------------------^

>>problem here is twofold - people don't check lost+found very often
>>so this could lead to an important file being thrown away before it
>>is missed - even worse, it is set up to discard any directory that
>>hasn't been modified in 7 days but when fsck puts something into
>>lost+found it keeps its original timestamp, so this means it doesn't
>>get to stay in lost+found for even a week, it could get removed
>>during the same reboot in which fsck put it into lost+found.
>
>Are you SURE about this?  I'm not.

Have you looked?

>
>The last time I manually cleaned out lost+found, I had files in there
>that were 14 months old.
>
>And believe me, the system was definately not up all that time... (OK,
>there were some days where the system was crashing more than I could
>control ... OK, there were a lot of days).
>
>Maybe something changed between OS releases?  I've never seen this
>happen with 3.5 or 3.51 ... (Of course, I haven't looked either, but
>then, I've no reason to... :-)

My system is 3.5.1.4.

>Of course, we should also be careful about claims and screams of
>"stupidity".  Some things may not be stupid, and some stupid things
>may not have been done by ATT.

In my original, I said:
    Subject: 3b1 startup: I CAN'T BELIEVE at&t was really this stupid!
    Summary: maybe it was Convergent

i.e. some stupid things may not have been done by ATT.

------  End of tit for tat, start of real rebuttal.  -------------

As I said originally "it may be commented out by default".  It is on
all of our machines, including some that *I* never checked before.
I think it probably comes commented out.  As long as no-one is
foolish enough to uncomment there is no problem.  But then, why
include commented-out dangerous code?  It serves no useful purpose
as is, and might lead someone to uncomment it thinking that it is a
carefully thought out working solution to the problem of file space
getting wasted in lost+found (when it is actually a disaster waiting
to occur).

Try looking at the last three lines of /etc/.cleanup to see if it
is there.  On my system it looks like:
--------------------------------------
# Clean the /lost+found directory if one exists

#find /lost+found -mtime +7 -type d -exec rm -rf {} \; >/dev/null 2>&1
^-------------------------------------
(Note: commented out - does not currently run. Do not change this.)
-- 
John Macdonald