On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 3:59 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> Did `icheck` and friends have something analogous to the `lost+found`
> directory created by `fsck`?
>
The lost+found directory was a tjk-ism although I can get a very small
level of credit/inspiration.  It was born of need.   Ted was explaining to
me one night that one of the issues when you had identified a file that no
directory was claiming was what to do with it.  Originally, Ted linked lost
files into root because there was usually only a couple of files, but ...
we startiong seeing a situation where often the root directory did not have
free directory slots.

Some of the folks (I want to say it was either bio-med or architecture
dept) had a recurring crash that occurred after a bunch of intermediate
files had been created on a long running program.  If the program stopped
we had a way of restarting it part way using them.   The problem was that
people did not clean up the /tmp directory so the program unlinked them
after creating them.  But if it crashed, the files were still there but
just connected to anything.   Ted could find them with f*ck [it had a
different name then].

I remember that we talked more about the issue and he came up with the idea
of creating the directory lost+found and then preallocating a bunch of
slots with a shell script instead of hoping the root directory was going to
being available.