Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ames!hc!lanl!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: 6386 shutdown: I CAN'T BELIEVE at&t was really this stupid!
Message-ID: <10443@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 23 Jun 89 15:00:28 GMT
References: <483@oglvee.UUCP> <14401@bfmny0.UUCP> <12044@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <2294@drilex.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 11

In article <2294@drilex.UUCP> dricejb@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson drilex1) writes:
>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...

It hasn't been necessary to perform periodic sync()s to maintain the
integrity of disk structures for many years now (in the System V branch
of the UNIX family tree, at least, and I've heard similar claims for
some 4BSD variants).  However, sync() does make the disk reflect a more
recent consistent state of the filesystem.  Without it, a sudden crash
could lose lots of kernel-buffered file information.