Mike McCarty wrote:
A related question is how to do it without taking the machine down uncleanly or fiddling an arcane file somewhere. I've thought about perhaps doing...
To my understanding it's not a good idea to do a fsck to a mounted filesystem. If your question is 'how to _force_ a fsck without _forcibly_ taking down the machine uncleanly', the answer could be:
shutdown -rF now this will bring the machine down cleanly, forcing a fsck on reboot. It still involves rebooting the system, though. Johannes