this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
74 points (98.7% liked)

Linux

47910 readers
1492 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Today I just learned that systemctl --force --force reboot is a command. We had a computer we remotely connected to which got permission errors and bus errors when we tried to reboot it normally. For some reason the mentioned command did actually manage to shutdown the computer bit did not manage to reboot it correctly.

I wonder what the double --force flag actually accomplishes and what possibly could hinder a regular reboot in this scenario.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You just really force it.

It's like with -v in various applications. -v means "verbose", and -vv means "really verbose", and -vvv means "an ungodly amount of data printed to the terminal, so much that it might crash".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)

But that's all part of the same argument. If it was -f or -ff that'd make sense. Duplicate parameters are usually ignored in like all other programs I can think of.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

The -vvv I know is the same as -v -v -v. Can't check right now, but is the short parameter -f? So maybe give -ff a try ...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

It's a dangerous command - I'd rather not run it by accidentally hitting the f key a second time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I agree. Specifying the same param twice like this feels like it should be idempotent. Sometimes a final cmdline string is built by multiple tools concatenating their outputs together; if each one adds --force without any way to know if it's already been added elsewhere, this could lead to undesirable behavior.

Even --forceforce would be better.