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From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: UNIX more fragile than MS-DOS files?
Message-ID: <7428@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 22-Sep-87 12:19:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: steinmet.7428
Posted: Tue Sep 22 12:19:35 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 24-Sep-87 06:44:41 EDT
References: <174@westmark.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 35

In article <174@westmark.UUCP> dave@westmark.UUCP (Dave Levenson) writes:
|UNIX files may sit in kernel buffers long after the process who last
|touched the file has terminated.  The sync command flushes the
|buffers, but unless you're planning to shut down, who uses it?
|
|MS-DOS, also, buffers files, but flushes the buffers associated with
|any given file when the file is closed.  If you shutdown without
[ I don't *think* there is any write buffering in MS-DOS. There is
  buffering in most programs which write to files, but I see nothing to
  indicate that the data is not physicaly written when DOS is called. I
  suspect that mean the FAT, which gets updates when the file is closed.
  After the write, the data is available for rereading in the beffers
  defined by "BUFFERS=" ]
|exiting the application, MS-DOS files get trashed, too. The apparent
|robustness of MS-DOS files comes, I think, from the user's tendency
|to exit the application, even if he doesn't shut down the system,
|before powering down.  MS-DOS has no shutdown command, so no need to
[ I completely agree. ]
|learn to use it.
|
|Some versions of UNIX run a daemon which syncs the filesystem
|periodically.
[ Other than in special maintenance modes, virtually all versions do
  this, and have for about ten years. ]
|-- 
|Dave Levenson
|Westmark, Inc.		A node for news.
|Warren, NJ USA
|{rutgers | clyde | mtune | ihnp4}!westmark!dave


-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me