[TUHS] shutdown for pre-v7 unix

Win Treese treese at acm.org
Thu Jul 17 12:29:20 AEST 2014


On Jul 16, 2014, at 4:52 PM, Brantley Coile <brantley at coraid.com> wrote:

> I never used shutdown, always three sync commands.  And when you type sync, you should type three sync commands on separate lines hitting newline after each.  Only one is needed, but the extras makes sure the operators didn’t type ‘sync’ then halt the box before the buffers were flushed.

From MIT Project Athena, in the mid-80s (when we were
actually running 4.2BSD, but many of the Athena hackers
were well familiar with earlier versions):

When thou shuttest down the system, thou shalt
sync three times. No more, no less. Three shall
be the number of the syncing, and the number of
the syncing shall be three. Four times shalt thou
not sync, neither sync twice, except that thou
proceedest to sync a third time…

 - Win




More information about the TUHS mailing list