Re: sync man page in coreutils and man-pages

[Pádraig Brady]

On 03/10/2014 12:10 PM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 01:03:41PM +0100, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
>>        The  kernel  keeps  data  in  memory to avoid doing (relatively
>>        slow) disk reads and writes.  This improves performance, but if
>>        the  computer crashes, data may be lost or the file system cor???
>>        rupted as a result.  sync ensures that everything in memory  is
>>        written to disk.
> 
> This part looks correct.

Yes, and it's already in the info pages:
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html#sync-invocation

Generally we keep the man pages to a minimum,
stating the interface and brief description.
Users are prompted to run info coreutils 'sync invocation'
for further discussion, where they'll see the above text.

> 
>>        sync  should  be  called  before  the processor is halted in an
>>        unusual manner (e.g., before causing a kernel panic when debug???
>>        ging  new  kernel  code).   In general, the processor should be
>>        halted using the shutdown(8) or reboot(8) or halt(8)  commands,
>>        which  will  attempt  to  put  the  system in a quiescent state
>>        before calling sync(2).  (Various implementations of these com???
>>        mands  exist;  consult  your documentation; on some systems one
>>        should not call reboot(8) and halt(8) directly.)
> 
> This kind of information does not seem useful for a user of a command
> line utility, and the last bit seems incorrect at least for Linux.

I agree.

thanks,
Pádraig.