July 2000
Beginner
446 pages
12h 53m
English
Content preview from Perl for System AdministrationBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 2. Filesystems
Perl to the Rescue
Laptops fall in slow motion. Or at least that’s the way it looked when the laptop I was using to write this book fell off a table onto a hardwood floor. The machine was still in one piece and running when I picked it up. As I checked the laptop to see if anything was damaged, I noticed it started to run slower and slower. Not only that, but the laptop began to make sporadic and disturbing humming-buzzing sounds during disk access. Figuring the software slowdown was caused by a software problem, I shut the laptop down. It did not go gently into the night, refusing to shut down cleanly. This was a bad sign.
Even worse was its reluctance to boot again. It would begin the Windows NT booting process and then fail with a “file not found” error. By now it was clear that the fall had caused some serious physical damage to the hard drive. The heads had probably skidded over the hard drive platter surface, destroying files and directory entries in their wake. Now the question was, “Did any of my files survive? Did the files for this book survive?”
I first tried booting to Linux, the other operating system installed on the laptop. Linux booted fine, an encouraging sign. The files for this book, however, resided on the Windows NT NTFS partition that did not boot. Using Martin von Löwis’s Linux NTFS driver, available at http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~loewis/ntfs/ (now shipping with the Linux 2.2 kernels), I mounted the partition and was greeted with ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.