Re: Why is .journal file sometimes visible and sometimes not?

[David Richardson <drr chpc utah edu>]

On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, John Hiemenz wrote:

> On Wednesday 19 September 2001 09:37, Ed McKenzie wrote:
> > Marcus,
> >
> > tune2fs tries to create a hidden journal file whenever possible.  If
> > a filesystem is mounted, though, doing so is apparently unsafe, and
> > tune2fs creates a .journal file instead.  The two "modes" are
> > functionally equivalent as far as I can tell.
> >
>
> This was an interesting tidbit.  I never thought to ask about visible
> journal files, thought they always were.  I am assuming I could unmount
> a partition, convert it to ext2 and then back to ext3 and the journal
> would then become hidden.  I have a test system I'll be doing that with
> shortly..

What I did to convert several partitions to hidden journals was:

umount /dev/whatever
tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/whatever
tune2fs -j /dev/whatever
e2fsck -f /dev/whatever
mount /dev/whatever
rm </dev/whatever's mountpoint>/.journal

Obviously, you can't convert your root partition this way.

The forced e2fsck is there because the man page for tune2fs says a fsck is
required after using 'tune2fs -O'.

Dave

-- 
David Richardson <drr chpc utah edu>
We aim to please.  Ourselves, mostly, but we do aim to please.