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The story of the name of the "fsck" command
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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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I first heard about this command from my dad when I told him I was installing Linux the first time and he told a joke that I don't remember the whole setup or anything but the punchline was that if you have to use FSCK, you're FUCKED since most of the time it wouldn't find a problem and if it did, it would end up erasing the whole disk.
My experience with it wasn't so dire. I actually never had any issues using it as it was meant, so I never really understood where the joke came from other than maybe just the spelling of the command.
Back in 2001 we got ext3, adding journaling to the most widely used filesystem on Linux - which can just roll back transaction on next mount, while previously you'd have to run fsck to get your filesystem back to a consistent state.
A non-journaling filesystem was easier to get into a state where things were broken in interesting ways, as a unclean unmount had a higher chance of impacting critical data.
In the early days of journaling filesystems fsck was also quite lacking - so when things got bad enough that you did need fsck there was a decent chance you'd end up in trouble.
Nowadays both robustness of the file systems as well as quality of fsck have greatly improved.