[ILUG] puzzle of the day: RHEL has files seemingly undoing edits

[Brendan Kehoe]

Have any of you ever heard of this?  Sent by someone I work with who's 
got very sporadic email access, so I'm probably just going to call him 
on the phone once I can come up with (or find) any theories on what 
could be doing this.  As far as I know it's not under anything like CVS 
or SVN.

    I'm running red hat linux. Several times the PC powered down
    unexpectedly due to power outs.....this could be the source of my
    problems...

    Anyway, I'm seeing files which I edit and change regressing back,
    all by themselves to previous versions of the file.
    Thus I edit the file, save, close, and do anything (md5sum, copy,
    wc, whatever) with the file, and it works fine.
    Then I come back in 20 minutes, and again try to use the file (run
    md5sum, whatever) and it fails,
    I check why and the file I had just updated is back to its original
    file!!

    My solution is to make the file read only (chmod 444) after I close
    it, and then it is not written over with the old version.  I would
    have closed all editors etc.

    During powerup the system did file file system corruption problems
    and ran fsck and e2fsck which did (seemingly) find and fix issues.


Thanks for any suggestions,
B