From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Theodore Ts'o Subject: Re: e2fsprogs tutorial or examples Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:29:51 -0500 Message-ID: <20130129212951.GA17244@thunk.org> References: <1359484603.41909.YahooMailNeo@web164603.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: ext4 development To: Anders Lind Return-path: Received: from li9-11.members.linode.com ([67.18.176.11]:46094 "EHLO imap.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750809Ab3A2V3y (ORCPT ); Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:29:54 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1359484603.41909.YahooMailNeo@web164603.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: 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