The many faces of fsck (2007) | Hacker News Reader

The many faces of fsck (2007)

lwn.net

50 pointsnolist_policy27 comments

I have been experimenting with z/OS on IBM Cloud and I have to say that datasets are amazing. No need to navigate a hierarchial file system (although that is available too), you can simply copy in a file from a dataset with ease.

I have never heard fsck pronounced as other than "fisk". I reckon the variation in pronunciation is due to a mainly written communication culture.

I'd figure pronouncing it as "filesystem check" or "f.s. check" would be common too.

Yeah I personally use "FS check", "FS tab", et cetera.

"FS check" makes sense, but I had never made that connection to the name. So, while I have always been saying "FS tab", I've also always said "eff sick" because I didn't know how you were supposed to pronounce it and thought of the name as gibberish.

I spell it out like a savage “f s c k”… its like calling fstab “f-stab.”

F S tab

Log, version 4J final version 2 final D_2 FINAL VERSION v1.09 FINAL (1).doc

It's a pretty interesting phenomenon. There are a lot of perfectly normal English words that are usually only used in written work rather than spoken, and I often pronounce them wrong, having never heard anyone pronounce them. "Segue" is one of these words.

Interestingly, I had a weird experience with that very word. I had seen it written. And I had heard it. But I didn't know they were the same word until one time I randomly saw captions in a video where it was said.

My college roommate got tripped up by the word "misled". He knew the spoken word as it was meant to be pronounced, (miss led), but didn't recognize the written word as that same word, and had this other word in his head that meant the same thing that he pronounced "myzulled."

One day, he said something like, "I was myzulled!", so I said... "do.. do you mean 'misled?'" at which point the light bulb moment occurred, and afterwards, we continued to deliberately use the "myzulled" mispronunciation as an inside joke.

https://hachyderm.io/@robpike/111593487329402102

"gosh, I can't boot my system, my filesystem is fucked!"

"Did you try to fuck your filesystem?"

"It's fucked already!"

"No, just fuck it; that'll unfuck it"

Discussed here btw:

On the pronunciation of “fsck” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38672435 - Dec 2023 (66 comments)

I say F-sack! At least, that's what the voice in my head says when I read it.

It'll always be F-sick for me.

I'm not sure I've heard anyone pronounce it, but I always read it as "FS check". Anything else (except maybe f.s.c.k.) would have me staring at you very confusedly trying to figure out what you're talking about.

Perhaps pronounce it like a singular form of "physics".

I've always loved this word. I've owned the domain fscking.com for a long time.

in the in-person office environments where I learned unix (system v, xenix, berkeley, solaris, linux) people invariably said fs"ee"ck and it is very frequently used as an oath, "this build is completely fscked"

fseek is pronounced effseek

I have read "fsick" somewhere and that makes sense to me - you use it when the FS is sick.

FS Check for me, I use it when I want to check something with the file systems.

This from 2007...

Respectfully: so what? Wait until you find out how old fsck is: http://mbzz.de/unix/ultrix/_root/fsck.pdf

The obsession with recency is easily my least favorite HN cultural norm.

Thank you for this, now I can say things are “old as fsck”.

Including the year in the title offers useful context. It is easy to miss when skimming the header of the article.

Added above. Thanks!

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