Re: e2fsprogs tutorial or examples

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 10:36:43AM -0800, Anders Lind wrote:
> Sorry to bother you genius and hard working developers.
> Is there any good examples or detailed tutorial about e2fsprogs? I know "man" is always the best friend. But I would like to see more real examples. Since I realized these set of utilities are so powerful that I cannot use it well by just browsing the manual.

There are two levels of using e2fsprogs.  The first is the basic
system administrator's use of mke2fs to format a new file system,
lsattr and chattr to manipulate file attributes.  For those, the man
pages should be plenty, and there are a lot of books and tutorials
about basic Linux/Unix system administration.

If you are trying to do very low-level detailed manipulation of the
file system using debugfs, or you are trying to repair a very badly
corrupted file system, it requires some very detailed understanding of
the file system.  For that, there are technical papers which describe
the details of the ext[234] file system family.  See:

https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Publications

There is also some books which describe low level file systems
details.  One example is File System Forensics Analysis, which doesn't
cover ext4 (since it's too old) and has a very specific bias in terms
of how to apply this technical knowledge:

http://books.google.com/books?isbn=0321268172

I give a tutorial with Lisa entitled called "How To Recover from Hard
Drive Disasters" which talks about basic file system technologies (as
well as partitions, etc.) from a very different approach.  So a lot
depends on what you are trying to do.

I hope this helps,

				- Ted