Odd question re linux & caches

Gene Heskett gheskett at wdtv.com
Sun Sep 30 18:57:25 UTC 2012


Greetings;

I was just bumfuzzled for several hours, here is the scenario:

I have an old TRS-80 Color Computer 3 in the basement, hooked up to this 
box by 2 separate methods.

One is a very high speed (for the coco) network over its bitbanger port at 
115 kilobaud.

Two is a shell (like bash) running on its hardware serial port, so I have a 
remote login that doesn't support any gfx commands.

The first is called drivewire by its author and can access a file 
containing an image of one of the coco's disks.

So, I 'touched' a file on this linux box, coupled to it by way of 
drivewire's mount facility, formatted this image as a disk, and then wrote 
a boot floppy image to it.  I could unmount/eject it, and remount/insert it 
and all the data was still there.

BUT, when I looked at it with linux 2 hours later with an ls -l, it was 
still a zero length file!  I had to access it with hexedit to verify that 
the data was there & looked ok.  After that, the proper file length of a 
bit over 161k was then shown by an ls -l.

Is there some switch I can set which will cause linux to refresh its cache 
when a file has been opened, written to and closed again?

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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the problem, not the remedy.




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