Re: fdisk quit/abort/exit

#1 (**permalink**) 02-22-2008, 01:21 PM

On 4/17/06, Nick Guenther <kousue@gmail.com> wrote:
> fdisk has 3 full ways to exit interactive mode: exit, quit and abort.
> I always confuse the first two and the only difference between the
> second is that one quits completely, and the other just steps out a
> level when editing extended partitions (which I've never had much need
> for, and it seems somewhat depraved to have more than 1 level of
> extended partitions anyway).
>
> So my question is: is a concious reason why there are 3 distinct
> commands? I think it would be better to have something like "quit",
> which prompts "Do you want to write MBR? [yes|no|cancel]" unless you
> give it "y" to force it to write, "n" to not write, "f" to force it to
> write all MBRs back down all levels currently selected, or "a" to
> abort, discarding all changes.
> so:
> quit -> quit y
> exit -> quit n
> repeated quits -> quit f
> abort -> quit a
> for "->" = "becomes"
>
> This makes it difficult to mess up a MBR if you aren't careful (or is
> that part of the design?), and is only 2 characters more typing if you
> insist on speeding through fdisk. If there's no objection, I'll go
> ahead and make a diff and submit it for review.
>
> -Nick

Would this break existing scripts that use fdisk? such as:

fdisk -c $cylinders -h $trackscylinder -s $sectorstrack -f
$srcdir/usr/mdec/mbr -e $disk << __EOC >/dev/null
reinit
update
write
quit
__EOC

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