Talk:Repairing early UNIX file systems
From Computer History Wiki
More history
From here by Guy Harris, Jan 15, 1984:
- Hal Pierson .. mentioned that ... "craftsmen" (which I think is AT&Tese for "field engineer") ... wouldn't know an inode if it came up and bit them in the *ss, so they had to replace "icheck" and "dcheck" with a new program which would do most of the dirty work of file system repair for them - Hal wrote one called "fcheck", which cleaned V6 file systems, and which appeared in source-code form on the PWB/UNIX 1.0 distribution tape. Unfortunately, PWB/UNIX 1.0 modified the V6 file system so that it didn't support "huge" files, and the eighth indirect pointer pointed directly to a block as the other seven did, so the "fcheck" there wouldn't fix a vanilla PWB/UNIX file system, but it worked just fine on a vanilla V6 FS. When I discovered it, quite by accident, I looked at it and it sure looked like a super-duper file system fixer; once we got it up, we never went back to "icheck" and "dcheck" again. Later on, of course, Ted Kowalski rewrote it to work on a V7 filesystem, added some extra checks, gave it the ability to reconnect files with no directory entries, put comments into the code (something Hal still has trouble doing :-)), cleaned it up some, and renamed it "fsck".
