The kernel keeps data in memory to avoid doing (relatively slow) disk reads and writes. This improves performance, but if the computer crashes, data may be lost or the filesystem corrupted as a result. sync ensures that everything in memory is written to disk.
sync should be called before the processor is halted in an unusual manner (e.g., before causing a kernel panic when debugging new kernel code). In general, the processor should be halted using the shutdown(8) or reboot(8) or halt(8) commands, which will attempt to put the system in a quiescent state before calling sync(2). (Various implementations of these commands exist; consult your documentation; on some systems one should not call reboot(8) and halt(8) directly.)
|--help||Print a usage message on standard output and exit successfully.|
|Print version information on standard output, then exit successfully.|
|--||Terminate option list.|
This page describes sync as found in the file utils-4.0 package; other versions may differ slightly.