6386 shutdown: I CAN'T BELIEVE at&t was really this stupid!

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <2294 at drilex.UUCP> dricejb at 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.