On Sat, 22 Nov 1997, Adrian Rollett wrote:

> Please take this as a question from an inexperienced sysad and not an
> accusation, but i was curious what reboot -n does, looked it up, and the
> man page sez:
> 
>      -n      If the -n option is specified, the file system cache is not
>              flushed.  This option should probably not be used.
> 
> What is the raison d'etre for reboot -n ?

Well, there are times when you don't want to flush the cache, like just
after you've run fsck on a mount disk!  Otherwise, a cache flush might
well overwrite the good info that fsck puts on the disk with bad info that
had been in the cache.

Personally, I prefer not to run fsck on a mounted disk.  If I have to run
fsck against my root partition, I first ``mount -u -o rdonly /'' to make
the disk read-only and flush the cache.  Then I can run fsck knowing that
a subsequent cache flush won't overwrite anything.  When I'm done, I can
remount the root partition with ``mount -u /''

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