Hi, Sometime in the 20th century (before my watch), a sync(8) page made its way into the Linux man-pages set that I maintain (http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/sync.8.html). It purportedly documents the sync command from fileutils, which gives an idea of its age, and the piece under notes notes some behavior of sync(2) that ceased to be true many years ago. The man-pages project generally focuses on only Linux kernel and (g)libc interfaces, so this sync(8) page doesn't really belong, and I would like to remove it. Also, I see that coreutils has a sync(1) page which covers the same command. However, I see that that page lacks some details that are in the sync(8) page. Before I retire the sync(8) page, would you be interested to integrate any of the following detail into the coreutils sync(1) page? The kernel keeps data in memory to avoid doing (relatively slow) disk reads and writes. This improves performance, but if the computer crashes, data may be lost or the file system cor‐ rupted as a result. sync ensures that everything in memory is written to disk. sync should be called before the processor is halted in an unusual manner (e.g., before causing a kernel panic when debug‐ ging new kernel code). In general, the processor should be halted using the shutdown(8) or reboot(8) or halt(8) commands, which will attempt to put the system in a quiescent state before calling sync(2). (Various implementations of these com‐ mands exist; consult your documentation; on some systems one should not call reboot(8) and halt(8) directly.) Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
