Where is my 2G? - MC

[Scott Lockwood]

On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 23:20 -0700, Patton Echols wrote:
> Interesting, Scott.  For those of us clueless . . . If he mistakenly 
> tells mc to send to an unmounted partition, what is the design 
> behavior?  I didn't seem to pick that up from the thread.  I am new
> to 
> linux and trying to figure out some of the design logic that has not
> yet 
> become "intuitive" to me.  Thanks for thoughts. 

Everything in unix is accessable as a file. Everything. Even raw,
unmounted partitions. If you couldn't do what he did, for example,
suspend to disk wouldn't work. Suspend to disk writes raw information to
your swap partition, and relies on being able to do that in order to
work. So do several other things, like blanking a hard drive partition
with dd, by going 'dd if=/dev/rnd of=/dev/hda1'

If you don't understand the unix philosophy, don't blame the tools for
your own lack of understanding. The ability to write to a raw partition
is a _good_ thing.

For those new to Unix and Linux in general, I highly reccomend reading a
few books. Amongst my favorites are, "Essential System Administration"
published by O'Reilly and Associates (or just ORA now), authored by
Aeline Fritch (appoligies to Ms. Fritch, I can't make that funny Ae
character right now), and Unix Power Tools by several authors by the
same publisher. There are several other good books that will teach you
some of the things that start to get into a bit more advanced wizardry.

-- 
Regards,
Scott Lockwood