Re: sync man page in coreutils and man-pages

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

Right then. The man-pages project just shrank by one page.

Thanks for your input, Pádraig.

Cheers,

Michael



-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/