PURGE(8)

💅 PURGE(8) — the glow-up edition ✨

okay so real talk, bestie: this is purge, and it lives in section 8 of the System Manager's Manual (that's the admin/command zone, iykyk 🫶). tiny page, but it serves.

🌸 NAME 🌸

purge — the command that forces your disk cache to be purged, which means flushed and emptied, both things, no half-measures 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

purge

that's it. no flags. no arguments. just vibes and one word 🎀

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the tea: purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache, which is genuinely so useful for performance analysis 🔥. like, you want your benchmarks to start from a clean slate the way a fresh boot would? this is the girl for that job.

the way that it does not touch anonymous memory that has been allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc. — yeah, that memory stays exactly where it is, untouched, unbothered, main character energy 👑. so don't come for it expecting a full memory wipe, because it is specifically about the disk buffer cache. periodt.

ngl, if you were hoping this clears everything, it doesn't — anonymous memory allocated by malloc, vm_allocate, etc. is off the table 🙈.

🔍 SEE ALSO 🔍

• malloc(3)
• sync(8)

and that's the whole page, bestie 🌈 no cap, purge is short and iconic.

💖 cute sign-off time: this page is from macOS, dated September 20, 2005, and it's the PURGE(8) page from the System Manager's Manual. she's been slaying since '05, and honestly? still got it 🎀✨