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Comment by yyx | Hacker News Reader

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/TheLegendOfSyn...

  people were told 'do several sync commands, typing each by hand'

  But this mutated to just 'sync three times', so of course people started writing 'sync; sync; sync'

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I still type sync (just once) before I reboot. Just a habit.

I always get some kind of error message from dmraid about having been unable to stop the RAID array on shutdown/reboot. I thus manually do a sync(1) in hopes that the data survives. Hasn't failed me thus far, at least.

The only machine I ever developed on that needed a sync before reboot was an ancient SPARC workstation.

I forgot to sync almost every time, but it would always boot after a fsck.

The last thing I do before I leave my work desktop for the day is

    ./eod.sh && sync && sync

20+ year old habits die hard.

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