oo
Turns out, it's pretty important if you use PAX for backup. In the man
page for PAX, there is an error (OK, we could call it a "potentially
catastrophic incompleteness"). It reads:
> The command:
>
> pax -r -v -f filename
>
> gives the verbose table of contents for an archive stored in filename.
Yup, it does do that. With a side effect: it also _replaces_ all the
files that come in from the archive. As is my custom, I did my
backup-validation real soon after the backup was written. Precisely
because I've seen the same sort of thing happen on other systems. So all
that file-restoring didn't do a lot of damage. Probably helped my
fragmentation somewhat (aha, an online defragger?) It did confuse one
hapless user, who lost an email message he _knew_ he hadn't deleted.
Apparently the system restored the file as of just before that critical
message came in.
The correct entry should read:
> The command:
>
> pax -v -f filename
>
> gives the verbose table of contents for an archive stored in filename.
Submitted by: John Beckett <jbeckett@southern.edu> via the BSDI mailing list
bdc95502ca