According to Bill Sommerfeld:
>
>I'm not at all sure why we included "sync".  It's a
>principle-of-least-surprise thing.  if you're not familiar with sun
>boot proms, you'd expect "sync" to give you the ddb prompt back after
>syncing filesystems.  i certainly wouldn't expect it to do a dump.
>

My guess is that whoever put the command in was a person used to Sun
boot-prom commands.  I must admit to having the same expectation for
the sync command - even on a Sun, it was rather embarressing to see the
machine do a kernel dump and reboot when I has assured the user I
wouldn't be disturbing them for long.  I didn't have any trouble
remembering what sync did on a Sun after that ;-)

>If we included the same functionality, but called the command "dump"
>or "panic" or "crash", rather than "sync", i would withdraw my objections.
>

Why not all of the above?  Do we have to limit ourselves to just one
name for the command?  Possibly we could put a warning into the sync
command that says "this will dump kernel core and reboot, are you
sure?" (perhaps with a timeout that will take the yes option for those
times when you are typing blind - eg after a panic with X running)


-- 
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Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, BAE SYSTEMS
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