When Atom saves a file, sometimes you need to flush all the data to the storage device immediately. For instance, you might want to make sure data is written to a persistent storage medium promptly, or a file might be on on a removable drive that may be unplugged without notice.
This simple package does an fsync() or equivalent to write all the
data immediately. The node.js function fs.fsyncSync() is called
after the file is written.
The original motivation for this package was to make Atom be a safe
editor for use with Adafruit Industries CircuitPython.
CircuitPython will automatically reload and restart when a file is
written to the CIRCUITPY drive. Several operating systems do not
write all data and metadata to USB drives immediately. This
delayed-write behavior can cause auto-reload to read an incompletely
written version of the updated file (such as main.py or code.py)
when CircuitPython restarts. It can also cause the CIRCUITPY
filesystem to become corrupted if the board is unplugged or reset
before the file is completely written.
As of this writing, this delayed-write behavior is noticeable on
Windows and Linux, but not on MacOS. Note that Linux may still write
additional metata to CIRCUITPY a minute or so later after saving the
file, causing an auto-reload. That's a different problem which this
package cannot address.