Re: Delete a file THAT big? Surely you are joking.

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>  >99% of the time it's a bug.

You got that backwards.

99% of the time when two processes are writing to a file, it's because they're
supposed to be writing to the file. If you couldn't do that you'd see stuff
like this:

% sh randomscript.sh > file
cat: duplicate writer
% cat randomscript.sh
#!/bin/sh

cat ~/.headerfile
anotherscript.sh
...
%

Wouldn't THAT be hateful?

> The OS should not let me remove the file if someone is using it, without even 
> telling the one using it.

% sh longrunningprogram.sh > /tmp/stuff &
% rm /tmp/stuff
longrunningprogram.sh: output deleted -- core dumped
%

Oh, that's definitely better!

> That someone will most of the time keep writing to the 
> file, thinking it is *persistent*, which it isn't.

Programs aren't paid to think.

> (and ignore the beautiful interactions with NFS)

NFS is too hateful to ignore, but it's too hateful to even bring up as a
reason NOT to do something.

• Yossi Kreinin 17:51 on 18 Dec 2006
  • Michael Leuchtenburg 18:24 on 18 Dec 2006
  • peter (Peter da Silva) 19:03 on 18 Dec 2006
    • Yossi Kreinin 07:40 on 19 Dec 2006
      • too deep to show
• dom (Dominic Mitchell) 16:17 on 19 Dec 2006
• jrodman 23:37 on 19 Dec 2006
• Patrick Carr 00:20 on 20 Dec 2006
  • Peter da Silva 00:47 on 20 Dec 2006

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