Re: [PATCH] Correction to check_filetype()

[Kalpak Shah <kalpak@clusterfs.com>]

On Sat, 2007-03-31 at 10:39 -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 08:35:09AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > And we can't really check the case where a directory gets turned into
> > a regular file without destroying e2fsck's performance, since that
> > would require reading the first block of every single file, and this
> > also significantly increases the chance of false positives.  So it's a
> > lot of complexity for what seems to have always been an artificial
> > test case.

Yes, you can't check whether each regular file is a directory or not.
The only case which is easy to check is whether the mode of a directory
is corrupted since directories will always have a "." and ".." entry. 

Note that we will still lose all data of a regular file if its mode is
changed to lets say, a socket. But there is hardly anything we can do
about this since there is no special check that can be associated with a
regular file.

Since dir_index feature is going to be set by default in ext3/4, maybe
we can check for EXT2_INDEX_FL in check_is_really_dir() and if this flag
is set then check if such a file is a directory or not. So we would not
be reading the first block of each file and yet would be able to correct
most directory mode corruptions.

Thanks,
Kalpak.