One of the reasons why the fsck page is a little vague is that it's a
front end progam which executes a file system specific checker
program. These programs are not necessarily consistent in how they
operate. The way e2fsck, which is the file system checker used for
ext2, ext3, and ext4 (and so /sbin/fsck.ext2, /sbin/fsck.ext3, and
/sbin/fsck.ext4, are either sym links or hard links to /sbin/e2fsck)
works is that without any options, it is interactive; it will require
access to a tty, and before it actually makes any changes, it will
*ask* the user whether it wants to correct a particular file system
corruption if it comes a cross scuh a corruption.
The options -n, and -y will make e2fsck automatically answer "no", or
"yes" to questions, so it can be used non-interactively --- i.e., it
doesn't need access to a valid tty for input, which is the case for
boot scripts.
The -p/-a option for e2fsck is called "preen" mode, which will answer
"yes" automatically for "safe" questions, and will exit with an error,
causing the boot script to abort the boot, for "dangerous" questions
that requires a system administrator's personal attention to minimize
the chances of data loss.
Other file system consistency checkers are sometimes a little
different, although most of them handle the -y, -n, and -a/-p as
described in the fsck man page since that's what the boot scripts use.
- Ted
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