| NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | VERSIONS | CONFORMING TO | NOTES | BUGS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON | The Linux Programming Interface |
SYNC(2) Linux Programmer's Manual SYNC(2)
sync, syncfs - commit buffer cache to disk
#include <unistd.h>
void sync(void);
int syncfs(int fd);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
sync():
_BSD_SOURCE || _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 500 ||
_XOPEN_SOURCE && _XOPEN_SOURCE_EXTENDED
syncfs():
_GNU_SOURCE
sync() causes all buffered modifications to file metadata and data to be
written to the underlying file systems.
syncfs() is like sync(), but synchronizes just the file system containing
file referred to by the open file descriptor fd.
syncfs() returns 0 on success; on error, it returns -1 and sets errno to
indicate the error.
sync() is always successful.
syncfs() can fail for at least the following reason:
EBADF fd is not a valid file descriptor.
syncfs() first appeared in Linux 2.6.39; library support was added to glibc
in version 2.14.
sync(): SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001.
syncfs() is Linux-specific.
Since glibc 2.2.2 the Linux prototype for sync() is as listed above,
following the various standards. In libc4, libc5, and glibc up to 2.2.1 it
was "int sync(void)", and sync() always returned 0.
According to the standard specification (e.g., POSIX.1-2001), sync()
schedules the writes, but may return before the actual writing is done.
However, since version 1.3.20 Linux does actually wait. (This still does
not guarantee data integrity: modern disks have large caches.)
bdflush(2), fdatasync(2), fsync(2), sync(8), update(8)
This page is part of release 3.41 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be
found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2012-05-04 SYNC(2)
HTML rendering created 2012-05-11 by Michael Kerrisk,
author of
The Linux Programming Interface,
maintainer of the
Linux man-pages project