Every so often, I run across surprising omissions in the Unix toolchestof small utilities and the like. Today's is a program to print some orall of the various passwd fields for a user, by extended analogy to id (which will print user and group information in useful ways); youwould use it to extract data like the shell or the home directory for aparticular account.

(Perhaps I should instead call this a lack in the 'GNU Unix toolchest',since everyone else seems to have

First, a note about IO modes. IET has two ways of doing IO to whatever actual storage is behind the iSCSItargets it advertises, called 'fileio' and 'blockio' respectively. Fileiomore or less does regular filesystem IO, as if you had opened the backingstorage at user level and were doing read() and write() to it. Blockiodoes low-level direct block IO to the backing storage. All of the followingis specific to blockio.

There are two levels of possible write caching