Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: kupdate & laptop's [patch for integration of mobile-update] | Date | Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:42:46 -0700 | From | Zack Weinberg <> |
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Nix wrote: > Zack Weinberg <zack@bitmover.com> writes: > > > Sort of like the > > current handling of dtime in ext2. > > That's one thing that's been puzzling me; what's the point of the dtime > attribute? Nothing in the kernel looks at it[1], stat() and fstat() (of > course) cannot return it... is its purpose solely to help out those > unfortunates trying to manually undelete files from an ext2fs > filesystem, or what?
This is before my time, but I believe the original intent was that deleted files would be preserved for some length of time - space reclaimed only when needed or when they got "old enough" - so you could undelete things without having to grovel through the raw disk. That was never implemented as far as I know. See NetWare for a similar idea.
Interestingly, there *is* no special handling of dtime in ext2fs: it's set and the inode is marked dirty just like any other inode update. So why is it, I wonder, that fsck always complains about deleted inodes with zero dtime but rarely if ever about other inode inconsistencies?
zw
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