[Techtalk] I've lost my prompt

[Mary Gardiner]

On Sun, Jul 08, 2001 at 08:48:27PM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> If you edited a file and then hit the power button, the machine
> may not have written the changes to disk anyway. (I suspect it did,
> but it's worth remembering.) It may also be in the middle of writing 
> stuff to disk and get itself very confused. 

Confusion in this case not only means that things on disk might not have been
saved, but that the portions of disk that the filesystem uses to store data
such as filenames, location of said file on disk and which files are in which
directories may have become damaged, in which case you may lose more than just
the file you were working on.

There are file systems that are designed as much as possible to guarentee the
integrity of this data (xfs is one), but it is still a good idea to shutdown
properly so that all the processes on your machine have a chance to die
gracefully, complete whatever they were doing, and finish logging etc.

Mary.

-- 
Mary Gardiner
<mary at puzzling.org>
GPG Key ID: 77625870 (wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net)