Re: GNU rm's man page doesn't name chattr as a "See Also"program

[Richard Dawe]

Hello.

Craig Carey wrote:
[snip]
> Eighthly, the GNU project is defending its observable 'in action'
> trait of taking a stubborn stand over data loss. Normally it just
> causes it (Glitchix).
[snip]

I don't think the Linux kernel is part of the GNU project. That's one reason
why it's called GNU/Linux and not just GNU.

If a document on data recovery of ext3 filesystems exists, I would expect it
to tell you about the chattr command.

Having been a victim of minor data loss from a Linux kernel bug that caused
corruption in FAT filesystems, I can sympathise with you. It still surprises
me that kernels relatively late into the stable series can cause data
corruption. I got burnt by 2.2.9 (I think).

The man pages are automatically generated. They're just a summary of the
output of "foo -h", listing the switches and directing the user to the info
documentation. So the information about chattr would belong in the info
documentation.

I agree it would be good if the info documentation to mention reasons other
than file permissions for why the file can't be removed. Perhaps there should
be an OS-specific section in the "Changing file attributes" node, which could
be linked to from the rm node.

I'll write a documentation patch for coreutils (which is the merger of
fileutils, sh-utils, textutils).

Regards,

-- 
Richard Dawe [ http://www.phekda.freeserve.co.uk/richdawe/ ]