ugh.book

UFS: The Root of All Evil 267

That may be good by Unix standards, but it’s not great.

Modern file systems use journaling, roll-back, and other sorts of file opera-
tions invented for large-scale databases to ensure that the information
stored on the computer’s hard disk is consistent at all times—just in case
the power should fail at an inopportune moment. IBM built this technology
into its Journaling File System (first present in AIX V 3 on the RS/6000
workstation). Journaling is in USL’s new Veritas file system. Will journal-
ing become prevalent in the Unix world at large? Probably not. After all,
it’s nonstandard.

Automatic File Corruption

Sometimes fsck can’t quite put your file system back together. The follow-
ing is typical: