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From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Stupid man pages
Message-ID: <1990Jun13.051844.26535@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 13 Jun 90 05:18:44 GMT
References: <1990Jun8.162656.14993@nbc1.ge.com> <ANSELMO-ED.90Jun9095657@bigbird.cs.yale.edu> <25367@cs.yale.edu> <90163.011455REL@MTUS5.BITNET>
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Reply-To: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
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In article <90163.011455REL@MTUS5.BITNET>, REL@MTUS5.BITNET (Robert
Landsparger) writes:
|> Excuse me, but can someone tell me why you would want to reboot if the
|> machine was on fire?  Always trying to learn something new!  I guess if
|> the drive head didn't sync and didn't pass through the flames and the
|> "boot" area was not engulfed in fire, the machine might come back up.
|> I don't know...

  Well, I can't say anything about the processor being on fire, but
there *are* situations when you want to reboot without the sync.  For
example, if fsck discovers problems with your root filesystem and tells
you to reboot immediately, you want to prevent the sync on reboot,
because the sync may write out to disk information which has just been
fixed by fsck, thus breaking it again.  Therefore, when rebooting in
this situation you use the -n flag to reboot.

  Or, at least, so I've been told.  Somebody please tell me if this
isn't really the case :-).

Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
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