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#1 2009-06-07 17:36:53

tomcooksey
Member
Registered: 2009-06-07
Posts: 7

Zero-sized executables? [SOLVED]

Hiya,

Trying Arch for the first time after 7 years of Gentoo bliss...

Anyway, I've encountered a lot of my favorite executables, fairly important ones like ps, top, watch, uptime, etc have zero size. While I admire the stream-lined approach, I'm wondering if it's possible to get pacman to fill those files with executable code so the commands actually do something?

I assume they are placeholders for the "real" executables in a package I have not yet installed? I _thought_ they were part of GNU coreutils - but pacman seems to think that's already installed?

I should also mention that I'm also trying XFS for the first time - could it be caused by filesystem corruption? (X hard locks my system every time it starts at the moment...)


Cheers!

Tom

Last edited by tomcooksey (2009-06-07 17:56:07)

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#2 2009-06-07 17:40:21

bwalk
Member
Registered: 2007-03-21
Posts: 177

Re: Zero-sized executables? [SOLVED]

~ $ ls -la =ps
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 67840 2009-05-14 08:04 /bin/ps*
~ $ ls -la =top
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 52484 2009-05-14 08:04 /usr/bin/top*
~ $ pacman -Qo =ps
/bin/ps is owned by procps 3.2.8-1
~ $ pacman -Qo =top
/usr/bin/top is owned by procps 3.2.8-1

hth.

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#3 2009-06-07 17:44:24

lucke
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2004-11-30
Posts: 4,018

Re: Zero-sized executables? [SOLVED]

Arch tries to keep it simple. Very simple. ;-)

Delayed allocation, present in XFS, indeed can result in zero-filled files in case of an unclean shutdown. XFS isn't a great idea for a root filesystem anyways, performance-wise - you might want to consider changing it. "pacman -S base" should reinstall all fundamental packages, use pacman -Sf to overwrite files.

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#4 2009-06-07 17:46:17

tomcooksey
Member
Registered: 2009-06-07
Posts: 7

Re: Zero-sized executables? [SOLVED]

oh dear - procps is installed. I guess xfs isn't so resilient after all and I have filesystem errors?

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#5 2009-06-07 17:48:26

tomcooksey
Member
Registered: 2009-06-07
Posts: 7

Re: Zero-sized executables? [SOLVED]

Ok, how about jfs - which was the other one I considered?

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#6 2009-06-07 17:52:54

lucke
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2004-11-30
Posts: 4,018

Re: Zero-sized executables? [SOLVED]

I'd go either with jfs or ext4 for root - ext4 also uses delayed allocation and at the moment suffers from the same problems as XFS, but there are workarounds in the 2.6.30 kernel, which should be released very soon. You can counter it with nodelalloc in fstab for the time being.

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#7 2009-06-07 17:55:38

tomcooksey
Member
Registered: 2009-06-07
Posts: 7

Re: Zero-sized executables? [SOLVED]

Thanks - all those programs have a size again. I might re-install again and try jfs.

Thanks for the help!

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