- What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix
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- What is lost+found directory in Linux/Unix?
- Surendra Anne
- Latest posts by Surendra Anne (see all)
- Linux for freshers
- What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix?
- 3 Answers 3
What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix
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What is lost+found directory in Linux/Unix?
This is an important directory which is useful for recovering files which are not properly closed due to many reason such as power failure. Lost+Found is created by system at the time of Linux OS installation for each partition we create. In other words we can say the mounted folder contains this lost+found folder. This folder contains the files with no links and files to be recovered. Any file to be recovered is kept in this folder. fsck command is used to recover these files.
This folder is not present in all the folders. Here is my HDD df command output.
surendra@linuxnix.com:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 37G 9.8G 26G 29% /udev 3.9G 4.0K 3.9G 1%
/devtmpfs 1.6G 920K 1.6G 1% /runnone 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none 3.9G 1.8M 3.9G 1% /run/shm none 100M 44K 100M 1% /run/user cgroup 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/sda5 37G 8.5G 27G 25% /home /dev/sda7 499G 298G 177G 63% /opt
If I go in to / or /home or /opt folder I can see this folder.
surendra@linuxnix.com:~$ cd /homesurendra@linuxnix.com:/home$ pwd/home surendra@linuxnix.com:/home$ ls lost+found surendra surendra@linuxnix.com:/home$
So in other words we can say for each partition this folder is present so that what ever files to be recovered with fsck can be kept in this folder. This folder is not accessible by normal user.
Surendra Anne
Mr Surendra Anne is from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. He is a Linux/Open source supporter who believes in Hard work, A down to earth person, Likes to share knowledge with others, Loves dogs, Likes photography. He works as Devops Engineer with Taggle systems, an IOT automatic water metering company, Sydney . You can contact him at surendra (@) linuxnix dot com.
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Linux for freshers
This is an important directory which is useful for recovering files which are not properly closed due to many reason such as power failure. Lost+Found is created by system at the time of Linux OS installation for each partition we create. In other words we can say the mounted folder contains this lost+found folder. This folder contains the files with no links and files to be recovered. Any file to be recovered is kept in this folder. fsck command is used to recover these files .
If you run fsck , the filesystem check and repair command, it might find data fragments that are not referenced anywhere in the filesystem. In particular, fsck might find data that looks like a complete file but doesn’t have a name on the system — an inode with no corresponding file name. This data is still using up space, but it isn’t accessible by any normal means.
If you tell fsck to repair the filesystem, it will turn these almost-deleted files back into files. The thing is, the file had a name and location once, but that information is no longer available. So fsck deposits the file in a specific directory, called lost+found (after lost and found property).
Files that appear in lost+found are typically files that were already unlinked (i.e. their name had been erased) but still opened by some process (so the data wasn’t erased yet) when the system halted suddenly (kernel panic or power failure). If that’s all that happened, these files were slated for deletion anyway, you don’t need to care about them.
Files can also appear in lost+found because the filesystem was in an inconsistent state due to a software or hardware bug. If that’s the case, it’s a way for you to find files that were lost but that the system repair managed to salvage. The files may or may not contain useful data, and even if they do they may be incomplete or out of date; it all depends how bad the filesystem damage was.
On many filesystems, the lost+found directory is a bit special because it preallocates a bit of space for fsck to deposit files there. (The space isn’t for the file data, which fsck leaves in place; it’s for the directory entries which fsck has to make up.)
What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix?
There is a folder at the root of Linux and Unix operating systems called /lost+found/ What is it for? Under what circumstances would I interact with it? How would I interact with it?
Note that only ext2 (and ext3 and ext4) use lost+found . If you want to hide it, either use a different filesystem or mount it elsewhere, keep everything in a subdirectory, and symlink the subdirectory to the «real» place you use the data from.
Note that lost+found is specific to the Linux extended file system (ext2–4). Unices, e.g. FreeBSD typically don’t have this directory on their file systems (UFS, ZFS).
Sorry, but lost+found has been around practically forever on BSD systems. In fact, I just checked and it was definitely there on 4.3BSD, and I seem to recall it a lot earlier. And it is certainly on FreeBSD today.
3 Answers 3
If you run fsck , the filesystem check and repair command, it might find data fragments that are not referenced anywhere in the filesystem. In particular, fsck might find data that looks like a complete file but doesn’t have a name on the system — an inode with no corresponding file name. This data is still using up space, but it isn’t accessible by any normal means.
If you tell fsck to repair the filesystem, it will turn these almost-deleted files back into files. The thing is, the file had a name and location once, but that information is no longer available. So fsck deposits the file in a specific directory, called lost+found (after lost and found property).
Files that appear in lost+found are typically files that were already unlinked (i.e. their name had been erased) but still opened by some process (so the data wasn’t erased yet) when the system halted suddenly (kernel panic or power failure). If that’s all that happened, these files were slated for deletion anyway, you don’t need to care about them.
Files can also appear in lost+found because the filesystem was in an inconsistent state due to a software or hardware bug. If that’s the case, it’s a way for you to find files that were lost but that the system repair managed to salvage. The files may or may not contain useful data, and even if they do they may be incomplete or out of date; it all depends how bad the filesystem damage was.
On many filesystems, the lost+found directory is a bit special because it preallocates a bit of space for fsck to deposit files there. (The space isn’t for the file data, which fsck leaves in place; it’s for the directory entries which fsck has to make up.) If you accidentally delete lost+found , don’t re-create it with mkdir , use mklost+found if available.