SYNC(1)

📦
version 0.12.0 · 7 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

💾 SYNC(1) — the sync girlies' manual 💾

okay so bestie, welcome to sync, from the General Commands Manual section of your friendly neighbourhood man pages. sit down, grab a lil snack 🍓, and let's talk about flushing your writes to disk, because honestly? it's giving data integrity. ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

sync — Synchronize cached writes to persistent storage 💅

like. your data is chillin' in the cache. sync is the one that's like "bestie, go to the actual disk, periodt." 🔥

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

sync [OPTION]... FILE...

yes she takes OPTIONs, yes she takes FILEs, and yes she will absolutely do the thing. 🫶

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

Synchronize cached writes to persistent storage.

that's it. that's the whole vibe. everything hanging out in the cache gets pushed out to persistent storage so it's actually, like, real. no cap. 💖

✨ OPTIONS ✨

  • -f, --file-system — sync the file systems that contain the files (Linux and Windows only, so don't come for me on other platforms 🫣)
  • -d, --data — sync only file data, no unneeded metadata (Linux only 💀)
  • -h, --help — Print help (iconic, she's helpful 🥰)
  • -V, --version — Print version (for when you need to know exactly which girl you're talking to 👑)
  • [files] — the files, bestie. hand them over. 📁

⭐ VERSION ⭐

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

🌈 Flush all pending write operations on all disks:

sync

just sync. no args. main character energy. she flushes everything. 💅

🌸 Flush all pending write operations on a single file to disk:

sync path/to/file

one file, one flush, one lil moment of peace. 🧚

💜 Flush writes and drop filesystem caches (Linux only):

sync; echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

okay this one is lowkey spicy — it flushes the writes and drops the filesystem caches. Linux girlies only. 🌈

🦋 Flush disk writes and attempts to clear inactive memory and filesystem caches (macOS only):

sync; sudo purge

macOS besties, this is your version. it tries to clear inactive memory and filesystem caches. cute and thorough. ✨

📝 The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail. not me being honest about it 😭🙈

okay that's the whole page, you ate it up, no crumbs. 🍽️✨

sign-off szn 💖 this was uutils coreutils version 0.12.0, dated 2026-09-25 — mwah, go flush those writes, bestie. 🎀🫶💅

📦 where this page comes from