I had a power outage affect my server’s large md RAID array. Rather than let the server as a whole be down while waiting for it to complete an fsck, I had it boot without the large array so I could run the fsck manually.
However, when running it manually I realised I had no way of knowing how far it was and how long it would take to complete. This is especially problematic with such a large array. With a little searching I found the tip of adding the -C parameter when calling fsck. I couldn’t find this in the documentation however: fsck –help showed no such option.
The option turns out to be ext4-specific, and thus shows a perfectly functional progress bar with a percentage indicator. To find the information, instead of “fsck –help” or “man fsck”, you have to input “fsck.ext4 –help” or “man fsck.ext4”. 🙂
« I couldn’t find this in the documentation however »
really!? i see it right here in fsck man page:
« -C [fd]
Display completion/progress bars for those filesystem checkers (currently only for ext2 and ext3) which support them. fsck will manage the filesystem checkers so that only one of them will display a progress bar at a time. GUI front-ends may specify a file descriptor fd, in which case the progress bar information will be sent to that file descriptor. »
Man pages do change every now and again. 😉
Ironically, on the system I happen to be logged onto right now, when I type “fsck –help”, it gives the version and nothing else. Le Sigh.