[vox-tech] questions about filesystem recovery

[Peter Jay Salzman]

1. what's the difference between e2fsck's -y and -p options?  it looks like
   the both answer "yes" to all of fsck's questions.

2. how do you get the official blocksize of a partition?  i know you can use
   mke2fs to print out the blocksize and superblocks that WOULD have been
   created had you created a filesystem (the -n option), but this isn't
   really getting the blocksize off a partition that's already created.

   and what is the "standard default" blocksize for ext3?  4096 bytes, right?

3. how do you read man pages when your whole filesystem is mounted read only?

4. someone had posted a script to reinstall all debian packages.  tried to
   find it in the archives, but couldn't.  so wrote this, and would like to
   know if there are any issues that people can think of before running it:

   #!/usr/bin/perl -w
   use strict;
   use diagnostics;
   
   my @debs    = `dpkg --get-selections | sed 's/[ \t].*//g'`;
   my $options = 'install --reinstall --assume-yes';
   
   
   foreach (@debs) { grep chomp, @debs; }
   print "\nThere are $#debs selections\n";
   
   
   foreach (@debs)
   {
      print("apt-get $options $_\n");
      # system('apt-get', "$options", "$_");
   }

   one question i have -- i really don't want dpkg to overwrite my
   tweaked config files (a substantial number of them).  on the other hand,
   i definitely want to tell apt-get "yes" when it asks if i really want to
   reinstall the package.

   i used the --assume-yes option, but i'm starting to think it's
   going to answer "yes" to dpkg's "should i overwrite your config files
   with my copy" question.

   is there a way to automatically tell apt-get "yes" to "should i
   really reinstall the package" but "no" to dpkg's "should i overwrite
   your modified config file with my own?"

   any possible gotcha's that anyone can think of before i run it?

thanks!
pete

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