On Saturday 05 March 2005 11:36, HaJo Schatz wrote: > On Fri, 2005-03-04 at 12:57 -0600, Hongwei Li wrote: > > Hi, > > > > The folder lost+found in the partition /tmp of my fc3 system is missing. > > All other partitions have it. What is the usage of lost+found folder? > > Do I need to create it for /tmp? If yes, just run mkdir ...? Do I need > > to do anything special for it? > fsck will create it when doing a check if it is not there or you could create it with mkdir. however, on my fc3 system /lost+found is 16384 bytes while a newly created directory made with mkdir is 4096 bytes. mkdir(1) and mkdir(2) list no option to specify the size for a new directory. The extra space may be to eliminate expanding the directory during recovery by fsck. > lost+found is a dir which exists on each partition. It's used to store > recovered data in case you had a fs-inconsistency and fsck tried to > repair it but was left with some chunks of data which it couldn't "sort > in" -- these chunks go to lost+found for you to recover manually later. > > /tmp is per definition a directory which holds temporary data which does > not have to survive a reboot. Hence a recovery of that dir/partition > during reboot doesn't really make sense -- the data to be recovered is > uselelss anyhow. that really depends on how the user or programs use /tmp rather that the definition of /tmp. Some data may be temporary but still valuable and worth recovering. It is probably better to recover it and not need it than not recover it and wish you had. > AFAIR /tmp is actually cleaned automatically at every > reboot. All I find for boot time cleaning is the following in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: # Clean up various /tmp bits rm -f /tmp/.X*-lock /tmp/.lock.* /tmp/.gdm_socket /tmp/.s.PGSQL.* rm -rf /tmp/.X*-unix /tmp/.ICE-unix /tmp/.font-unix /tmp/hsperfdata_* \ /tmp/kde-* /tmp/ksocket-* /tmp/mc-* /tmp/mcop-* /tmp/orbit-* \ /tmp/scrollkeeper-* /tmp/ssh-* a daily cron job does a cleaning of /tmp. see /etc/cron.daily/tmpwatch and tmpwatch(8) > It may very well be a bug of the cleaning routine to also delete lost > +found in the progress during reboot. Whether this is is a serious one > however is not so clear to me -- you're never supposed to recover > anything on this partition anyhow... Do you actually have /tmp in a separate partition? I do not, so there is no lost+found directory in it. paul -- Paul F. Almquist paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Eau Claire, WI USA