Re: [Pan-users] Re: Is there anything like an undelete file?

[Per Hedeland]

Duncan <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>Finally, note that "terminating with extreme prejudice" any program using
>the above kill -9 isn't an operation to be undertaken lightly.  Again, it
>does /not/ allow the program to terminate in an orderly fashion, and is
>generally used to kill a program that's gone off into a never-never land
>and won't respond to ordinary polite system requests to close.  Thus,
>there's always a small risk when doing so that it was in the middle of
>something very important, writing another file to disk or whatever.  With
>PAN, that risk is fairly small, provided you exercise reasonable caution. 
>However, it remains a small risk.  If the program is in the middle of
>writing to disk when it's terminated, doing so may result in creating an
>inconsistent file system status on your disk, and thereby a file system in
>need of an fsck or whatever to set things straight.

No, killing a user process, with -9 or otherwise, cannot cause file
system corruption on any Unix/Linux file system - it is the kernel's job
to ensure file system integrity, and so the only risk of corruption is
when the kernel crashes (or has a bug, or power is lost, etc).

It may well cause corruption to file *contents* though, which won't be
handled by even a journalled file system, nor noticed or fixed by fsck
and friends.

--Per Hedeland
address@hidden