[TUHS] Unix v7 icheck dup problem

[KenUnix]

Attached is the one I have been toying with. Ignore the 'v7' part I added.

Ken

On Sat, Mar 4, 2023 at 9:41 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

>     > From: Clem Cole wrote:
>
>     > It had more colorful name originally - fsck (pronounced as fisk BTW)
>     > was finished. I suspect the fcheck name was a USG idea.
>
> I dunno. I don't think we at MIT wold have gratuitously changed the name to
> 'fcheck'; I rather think that was its original name - and we pretty
> definitely got it from CMU. 'fsck' was definitely descended from 'fcheck'
> (below).
>
>
>     > From: Jonathan Gray
>
>     >> (are 'fsck' and 'fcheck' the same program?)
>
>     > https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7addenda/fsck
>
> Having looked the the source to both, it's quite clear that 'fcheck' is a
> distant ancestor of 'fsck' (see below for thoughts on the connection(s)).
> The
> latter has been _very_ extensively modified, but there are still some
> traces
> of 'fcheck' left.
>
> A lot of the changes are to increase the portability, and also to come into
> compliance with the latest 'C' (e.g. function prototypes); others are just
> to
> get rid of oddities in the original coding style. E.g.:
>
>   unsigned
>         dsize,
>         fmin,
>         fmax
>   ;
>
> Perfectly legal C, but nobody uses that style.
>
>
>     > From: Jonathan Gray
>
>     > fcheck is from Hal Pierson at Bell according to
>     > https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/CB_Unix/readme.txt
>
> Hmm. "the major features that were added to UNIX by CB/UNIX ... Hal Person
> (or Pierson?) also rewrote the original check disk command into something
> that was useful by someone other than researchers."
>
> I poked around in CB/UNIX, and found 'check(1M)':
>
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/USDL/CB_Unix/cbunix_man1_01.pdf
>
> (dated November 1979). Alas, the source isn't there, but it's clearly in
> the
> fheck/fsck family. (CB/UNIX also has chkold(1M), which looks to me like
> it's
> 'icheck'.)
>
> So now we have a question about the ancestry of 'check' and 'fcheck' - is
> one
> an ancestor of the other, and if so, which - or are they independent
> creations? Without the source, it's hard to be definitive, bur from the
> messages (as given in the manual), they do seem related.
>
> Clem's message of 3 Mar, 14:35 seems to indicate the the original was from
> CMU, authored by Ted Kowalski; he also:
>
>   https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=anecdotes:clem_cole_student
>
> says "Ted Kowalski shows up for his OYOC year in the EE dept after his
> summer
> at Bell Labs ... He also brought his cool (but unfinished) program he had
> started to write originally at U Mich - fsck". So maybe the CB/UNIX
> 'check' is
> descended from a version that Ted left behind at Bell Labs?
>
> Is anyone in touch with Hal Pierson? He could surely clear up these
> questions.
>
>         Noel
>


-- 
End of line
JOB TERMINATED
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20230304/05a7613e/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: v7fsck.c
Type: text/x-csrc
Size: 33044 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20230304/05a7613e/attachment.c>