Kyle Jones writes: It is surprising to me as well, but expermental evidence shows that it is true in several cases, in particular the case of NFS mounts where both client and server are running Linux. And the comments in the fileio.c show that people have been running into this misfeature on other systems as well - Apollo, VMS and WinNT. On a more general note, why is HAVE_FSYNC being handled the way it is (in src/sysfile.h) instead of by the configure script? The existing logic seems convoluted - since Linux #defines USG, sysfile decides not to #define HAVE_FSYNC, even though Linux has fsync. Am I misunderstanding the purpose/meaning of the HAVE_FSYNC symbol? What does USG have to do with it?

On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Kyle Jones wrote: I seem to remember somewhere that NFS writes may be postponed until close(). That is, close() may give errors such as disk full, etc, because for performance reasons, write() is only done locally and disk allocation is not done until close [or a later write]. -Justin vallon(a)mindspring.com