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

[Craig Jackson drilex1]

In article <12044 at bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> jfc at athena.mit.edu (John F Carr) writes:
>In article <14401 at bfmny0.UUCP> tneff at bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
>
>>To minimize the risk from power hits and crashes, I add a root cron job
>>that performs a 'sync ; sync' every 10 minutes.  I have not been reliably
>>persuaded that this is something the kernel does automatically on V/386,
>>although I know of UNIXen where that's true.
>
>We have the following man page (and a program to go with it) on our BSD 4.3
>system.
>
>UPDATE(8)           UNIX Programmer's Manual            UPDATE(8)

Sometime during the creation of System V, somebody decided that init has
plenty of time to toss in a sync now and then.  I believe that it does so
about once every four minutes or so.  (This is plenty of time to reboot the
system if you've just fsck'ed root & repaired it.)

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...

Here's a 
little inews
fodder.
-- 
Craig Jackson
{bbn,ll-xn,axiom,redsox,atexnet,ka3ovk}!drilex!{dricej,dricejb}