On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 2:21 PM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
The reason it is not the default in CentOS is because it is not the default in RHEL.
As to why it is not the default in RHEL, I can't say for sure ... BUT ... -y (auto answer yes) is more dangerous that -p (preen). The definition of preen is "to automatically fix any filesystem problems that can be safely fixed without human intervention". When you do -y instead, it answers yes to everything ... including things that can't be fixed "without human intervention". That is not necessarily the safest thing to do. If you choose to do this, make sure you have good backups :D
I do sort-of understand the difference between the -p and -y - and the CentOS position on the subject. But seriously, how many people are going to be able to recover a filesystem better than fsck? And you need the backups anyway - the disk might really be dead.