[Courses] [FS] Lesson 5

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 07:52:32AM -0600 or thereabouts, Christine Bussman wrote:
> Looking at my own fstab, I have a few questions.
> (my fstab is located at the end of this email for reference)
> 
> 1.  What does the 'notail' option do?  (I have that set on
> several Reiserfs partitions)

I looked in "man fstab" for this and didn't find it. Eventually,
I found this in "man mount" by wading through it. It was in the
ReiserFS set of options.

   notail By  default,  reiserfs  stores  small  files  and  file  tails
          directly  into  its  tree.  This confuses some utilities such as
          LILO(8).  This option is used to disable packing of  files  into
          the tree.

Quite what a file tail is, I am not sure :) 

I don't know the other answers, except that I know that /proc is
a special filesystem in some way. Perhaps the explanation is in
the lesson. I haven't read it yet: I am having trouble reaching
the site. 

Other thing I remember about /proc: people used to tell me never
to use 'more /proc/somefile' or 'less /proc/somefile'. However, 
it was okay to do 'cat /proc/somefile | less' (or more). For 
reasons I have completely forgotten. I'd love to know what they
were!

Right, back to trying to reach the lesson itself :) 

Telsa