[TriLUG] e2fsck under cron gets retcode=8 operational error

[Igor Partola]

>
> o output should be machine readable
>


Machine and human if possible. Really this comes down to good error
messages and/or good error codes.


>

o make best effort. If you don't have a tty, then do the things you can do
> without a tty. If an unknown option is given, ignore it, with a warning.
>
>
>
Joe, it seems to me that in your case this would actually cause you more
grief. Basically, fsck would run fine every time there is no error
(probably 99% of all times) and fail 1% of the time when a tty was required
to confirm the fix and there was none. When you noticed this you'd run fsck
by hand and fix the problem, wondering why it failed. It would take
significantly longer to to figure out that there is a systematic problem in
the first place. As is, e2fsck fails right away, so you know there is a
problem right away.

The way I see it, there are two reasonable solutions to this problem:

1. Fix e2fsck to have good error codes.

2. Fix the man page for e2fsck, showing how to run it through cron, or
similar. If #1 is not an option, perhaps this would be the simplest fix.

All of the above is IMHO.

Igor