On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 01:31:17 PDT, Hans Reiser said: > Thanks for explaining > > sync;sync;sync;halt > > I always felt I was failing to grok something.
As was the author who recommended it. It started out as: # sync ( this one schedules the I/O) # sync ( just a time waster typing) # sync ( just a time waster typing ) # halt ( and we finally actually shut down). The disks on the old PDP and Vax 750 boxes were actually sluggish enough that if you had a whole 1M or 2M in the buffer cache to flush out, it was actually not difficult to enter "sync", hit return, enter "halt", hit return, and have the halt happen before sync finished, doing the predictable to the non-journaled file systems. Empirical studies showed that even on the biggest-memory boxes, sync could almost always finish with 2 time-wasters before the halt.. ;)
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