[Trisquel-users] Re : How can awk as a substitute for paste

[lcerf]

'awk' does not aim to synchronize cached writes to persistent storage.   
'sync' does.  To call it every 5 seconds:
while sleep 5
do
    sync
done

But you do not want a hard-coded value.  A default is good though.  Also, for  
greater performances, you should be able to give the list of the files to  
sync.  That gives a script such as:
#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
    while sleep 5
    do
        sync
    done
fi
if [ -z "$2" ]
then
    while sleep $1
    do
        sync
    done
fi
period="$1"
shift
while sleep $period
do
    sync -d "$@"
done

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