[PLUG] lost+found

[Shannon C. Dealy]

On 15 May 2002, D. Cooper Stevenson wrote:

[snip]
> At the practical level you can safely ignore this directory it's there
> "just in case."
[snip]

Just clarifying, while you can ignore it, DO NOT DELETE IT.  If it should
be accidentally removed, don't create it by using mkdir, use mklost+found.
Basically this is a directory pre-initialized to be large enough to hold a
significant number of "lost" files.  If your system crashes and the file
system is full (not uncommon, since full file systems often caused system
crashes though I haven't seen this problem under Linux for many years),
then there would be no way for the fsck to save the lost files, since it
would need to create a directory to put them in on a file system which
doesn't have any room to create them.

NOTE: Not all file system types need or use a lost+found directory.

Shannon C. Dealy      |               DeaTech Research Inc.
dealy at deatech.com     |          - Custom Software Development -
                      |    Embedded Systems, Real-time, Device Drivers
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