How to Torture Your Own File Systems:

1) Find a machine that you are willing to crash.

2) On that machine, find a filesystem that you are willing to newfs.

3) Get a copy of torture.pl and a Perl 4.10 or better.

4) Get a copy of the patched gnu diff.

5) cd into the sacrificial filesystem, and create a directory to put
the restored image in. (If you are testing numerous programs, you may
want to keep multiple restore directories, each named after the
program being tested.)

6) Run torture.pl; it will create a DumpTestDir directory and put the
directory from Hell into it. When it finishes, it will prompt you for
a command. The command should be the full archive and restore through
a pipe pair, relative to ., so that for SunOS tar it would read:
	tar -cf - DumpTestDir | (cd SunOS-tar; tar -xf -)
(Running in verbose mode is more reassuring, but very verbose.)
torture.pl should be run as a normal user unless you are very
confident, and very willing to newfs the file system, since as root it
tends to hard link directories.

7) Once torture.pl completes, run "gnudiff -r -b -Q -X DumpTestDir
SunOS-tar" (replacing the directory names as appropriate. You will get
a quite exhaustive list of the differences.

8) Mail me the results, please.

Many programs fail in step 6; once you have run torture.pl, you can
simply run the archive program from the command line, unless you
really want the active tests. Figuring out exactly what causes the
program to fail is something of an art form.

