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From: trb@ima.UUCP (Andrew Tannenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: cpio and lost+found
Message-ID: <264@ima.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 14-Nov-86 15:18:56 EST
Article-I.D.: ima.264
Posted: Fri Nov 14 15:18:56 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Nov-86 03:24:04 EST
Reply-To: trb@ima.UUCP (Andrew Tannenbaum)
Distribution: world
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 14

Did you ever notice...

If you save a file system with cpio, it doesn't save the contents of
each directory file, it just saves the directory as an empty entity and
it gets filled with the appropriate files.  While this is the correct
action in most cases, it is wrong in the case of the lost+found
directory.  (It's supposed to have a bunch of spare empty slots, but it
gets created by cpio with no spare empty slots.)

Does anyone deal with this in a rational way?  If you restore a filesystem
like this, you should run a mklost+found program which creates a bunch of
files and then proceeds to delete them, leaving empty directory slots.

	Andrew Tannenbaum   Interactive   Boston, MA   +1 617 247 1155