Home
| Calendar
| Mail Lists
| List Archives
| Desktop SIG
| Hardware Hacking SIG
Wiki | Flickr | PicasaWeb | Video | Maps & Directions | Installfests | Keysignings Linux Cafe | Meeting Notes | Blog | Linux Links | Bling | About BLU |
There are tons of classic stories from the old days of Unix where filesystem corruption left the machine in a state where it would be unable to boot, and rebooting would make it necessary to wipe the hard drives and reinstall the entire system from the original installation tapes. This would have left a critical production system unavailable for days. In at least one of these stories, one of the sysadmins still had a root shell within Emacs on an X11 terminal, and was able to copy and paste the identical binaries from another server, and get the system back to a state where it was able to restore from backups, and the total downtime was only a couple hours. Without features like the builtin echo, it wouldn't have been possible to fix the system, and they would have had to reboot and then reinstall. Ben Holland wrote: > Just as a quick question and i'm not trying to be a dick about it, but if > you have a major file system corruption, why would the ability to know what > files are there be important. I really do ask this question in earnest, and > more to the point even, if the file system is hosed, and you can still > though the luck of the gods read the inode table how would the actual files > themselves not be corrupted. I mean, i'm kinda assuming that you picked this > info up because you had to, i'm just wondering about the circumstances. > > 2008/4/3 Derek Martin <[hidden email]>: > > >> On Thu, Apr 03, 2008 at 06:26:38PM -0400, Derek Martin wrote: >> >>> foo=`echo *.zip |grep -v '*\.zip'` >>> >> Incidentally, in this way, echo can be used like ls: >> >> $ echo * >> >> Why is this useful to know? Say your system has severe filesystem >> corruption, and /bin/ls is one of the files that was corrupted. In >> general, if that happens, ls will not work, but if your shell still >> works, you can still get a list of the files in the directory with >> that command. If you want to also see "hidden" files, then this: >> >> $ echo * .[A-Za-z0-9]* >> >> Of course, that assumes Roman alphanumeric characters. It doesn't >> work very well if you have files called things like .���ö�ë in the >> directory. =8^) >> >> >> -- >> Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 >> -=-=-=-=- >> This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will >> result in >> undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience. >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Discuss mailing list >> [hidden email] >> http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss >> >> >> > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [hidden email] > http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss >
BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups | |
We also thank MIT for the use of their facilities. |