sfdisk patched

sfdisk patched

Posted Aug 24, 2004 18:25 UTC (Tue) by dwheeler (subscriber, #1216)
Parent article: Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together

Clearly, the main problem here (installing GNU/Linux keeps Windows from booting) needs to be fixed. But this article brought a related problem to my attention: sfdisk's output can't always be used as input to sfdisk, even though it's supposed to. That's because sfdisk warnings are sometimes sent to stdout, instead of stderr as intended.

I just created a patch to sfdisk to fix this problem, so that you won't have to use a text editor just to send sfdisk output to sfdisk again, and sent it to Andries Brouwer (chief maintainer of util-linux, which contains sfdisk). Andries Brouwer has already accepted the patch in the mainline of util-linux (by the way, kudos to he and others for working on such critical yet unsung utilities). You can get the sfisk patch as an attachment in the Fedora Core Core 2 bug 115980 discussion.

This patch doesn't solve the immediate problem of a messed-up partition due to an install. And until the newest util-linux gets distributed widely, the patch won't solve the problem of interleaved warnings for current sfdisk users. But the patch DOES mean that, if a similar solution is ever be needed in the future, it'll be much easier to apply.

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