Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!bbn!drilex!dricejb
From: dricejb@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson drilex1)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: 6386 shutdown: I CAN'T BELIEVE at&t was really this stupid!
Summary: init has time to do update(8)
Message-ID: <2294@drilex.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jun 89 14:09:15 GMT
References: <483@oglvee.UUCP> <14401@bfmny0.UUCP> <12044@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: dricejb@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson drilex1)
Organization: DRI/McGraw-Hill, Lexington, MA
Lines: 28

In article <12044@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> jfc@athena.mit.edu (John F Carr) writes:
>In article <14401@bfmny0.UUCP> tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
>
>>To minimize the risk from power hits and crashes, I add a root cron job
>>that performs a 'sync ; sync' every 10 minutes.  I have not been reliably
>>persuaded that this is something the kernel does automatically on V/386,
>>although I know of UNIXen where that's true.
>
>We have the following man page (and a program to go with it) on our BSD 4.3
>system.
>
>UPDATE(8)           UNIX Programmer's Manual            UPDATE(8)

Sometime during the creation of System V, somebody decided that init has
plenty of time to toss in a sync now and then.  I believe that it does so
about once every four minutes or so.  (This is plenty of time to reboot the
system if you've just fsck'ed root & repaired it.)

Personally, I've always thought that update(8) was a hack, ever since I
first saw it in Version 7.  To think that someone would write an operating
system that couldn't even keep its on-disk data structures consistent...

Here's a 
little inews
fodder.
-- 
Craig Jackson
{bbn,ll-xn,axiom,redsox,atexnet,ka3ovk}!drilex!{dricej,dricejb}