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
-vin various applications.-vmeans “verbose”, and-vvmeans “really verbose”, and-vvvmeans “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
-for-ffthat’d make sense. Duplicate parameters are usually ignored in like all other programs I can think of.The
-vvvI know is the same as-v -v -v. Can’t check right now, but is the short parameter-f? So maybe give-ffa try …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
--forcewithout any way to know if it’s already been added elsewhere, this could lead to undesirable behavior.Even
--forceforcewould be better.Yeah, duplicate flags should just be ignored.
–force-and-I-really-mean-it-this-time