On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 13:19 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Monday 03 April 2006 12:19, Sjoerd Mullender wrote: > >Sjoerd Mullender wrote: > >> Gene Heskett wrote: > >>> I was under the impression (and no idea where I heard/read that > >>> now) that any partitions marked 0 0 on the end of the fstab line > >>> were mounted in 'single' mode. Is this not the case? I haven't > >>> used single with this FC2 install ever, no need to so far, so I > >>> don't know, but I'll find out the next time I reboot to it. > >> > >> Those numbers are the dump frequency and dump pass number, i.e. > >> unused by nearly everyone nowadays. They were there way back > >> (nearly 30 years ago) when they were actually used, but since hardly > >> anybody uses dump/restore anymore to make backups, those fields are > >> not used anymore. See the descriptions of fs_freq and fs_passno in > >> the manual page for fstab(5). > >> > >> (If you look at the manual for dump (if you have it installed), you > >> can see that dump uses dump levels. A dump at level n will dump > >> everything that changed since the last level m (m <= n) dump. The > >> pass number specifies which partitions can be dumped at the same > >> time, first all partitions with pass number 0, then all with pass > >> number 1, etc.) > > > >Oops. The level is for fsck (file system check), not dump. It's been > > a while. > > I was thinking I'd recalled it in that context. Its not well clarified > in the manpages IMP. ---- man fstab... The fifth field, (fs_freq), is used for these filesystems by the dump(8) command to determine which filesystems need to be dumped. If the fifth field is not present, a value of zero is returned and dump will assume that the filesystem does not need to be dumped. The sixth field, (fs_passno), is used by the fsck(8) program to determine the order in which filesystem checks are done at reboot time. The root filesystem should be specified with a fs_passno of 1, and other filesystems should have a fs_passno of 2. Filesystems within a drive will be checked sequentially, but filesystems on different drives will be checked at the same time to utilize parallelism available in the hardware. If the sixth field is not present or zero, a value of zero is returned and fsck will assume that the filesystem does not need to be checked. Seems clear enough but you can write a patch for the man page if you can explain it better. Craig
