[Gllug] Building Intranet Kiosks

[Alain Williams]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 04:42:11PM +0000, Simon Stewart wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 04:24:00PM +0100, tet at accucard.com wrote:
> > 	sync; sync; sync; <hit big red power button> :-)
> > 
> > The only reason to run sync 3 times was because the command exited
> > before the data could be guaranteed to be flushed to disk. The logic
> > was that by the time the third one exited, the first one would have
> > been able to finish flushing to disk.
> 
> It all comes floating back. When I started with Linux, I remember the
> advice was that if the console was rendered inoperable (for example,
> by X misbehaving) it was best to wait until the disks had synced
> before hitting the big red power button.
> 
> Ahhh... those happy minutes waiting for my disk light to flash for
> half a second. :)

No, it was originally:
	sync
	sync
	sync
	^p
The ^p on the PDP11 got you to speak with the microcode.
The point about sync on 3 separate lines was to slow you down to give the machine
time to sync. Some clever twit thought that he would show off my doing it all one
one line, and so defeating the purpose: he then put it in a book that was popular
15 odd years ago.

Ho, hum.

-- 
Alain Williams

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