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.
Weird choice tbh. I’d make --force --force a separate option if possible.
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”.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.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 …It’s a dangerous command - I’d rather not run it by accidentally hitting the
f
key a second time.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.Yeah, duplicate flags should just be ignored.
–force-and-I-really-mean-it-this-time
swear, but it is funny