ABANDONED SECTORS

abandoned

Lists sectors that have been abandoned by users.

Despite warnings by well-meaning oldsters that "things you put on the internet
will never disappear", they sometimes do. After all, I, the sysadmin, could
slam my finger into the eject button propelling the disk this system relies on
out into the open air of my home. I could take a magnet to it, or if I'm
feeling *extreme*, a degaussing device and wipe away every precious bit of
data you've written to it, as I laugh maniacally, knowing good and well I've
destroyed the 512-byte hopes and dreams of a thousand helpless souls.

But, I wouldn't do that. In fact, this command is evidence to my dedication to
data-hoarding.

If a user's account gets terminated or for whatever reason sectors are given
up, the content on them doesn't simply disappear. Oh no, no, no, dear user;
this is the INTERNET where, as educational VHS's might tell you, nothing EVER
goes away! Unless the content on the sector happens to be wildly
inappropriate (let's say a particularly unethical password dump, a post meant
to bully another user, or even--dare I say it, for the weak may faint and the
strong become ill--a suggestion that NES games should be played in 16:9), it
shall remain to be reclaimed. When another user ultimately reclaims it, they
will inherit the content, with which they may do whatever they want.

Note that abandoned sectors with zero content (literally, all 0x00's), will be
removed from the hard disk cache and simply appear as unclaimed. This is
largely so that users can make use of this command ("abandoned", if you've
forgotten), to look through content that now belongs to no one.

If you want to read all abandoned sectors using just one command, you can do so like this:
abandoned | xargs sr