Generally, fsck is run either automatically at boot time, or manually by the system administrator.

As boot time fsck is expected to run without user intervention, it generally defaults to not perform any destructive operations.

Some examples are: Independent of checking the file system structure, modern file systems may offer a data scrubbing tool to check for silent corruption in stored data against a mirror or a checksum.

[11] It is unclear whether this usage was cause or effect, as a report from a question and answer session at USENIX 1998 claims that "fsck" originally had a different name: That story has been confirmed by Rob Pike on the Mastodon social network on December 17, 2023: Ted Kowalski, username frodo, may he rest in peace, was the original author, just down the hall from my office in Murray Hill, and his name for the program had a 'u' where there is now an 's'.

"Go fsck yourself", is occasionally used online as an injunction to a person to go and correct their issue (attitude, ignorance of the subject matter, etc.)