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> > Unix always had the tradition to give you enough rope so you can > hang yourself. OTOH, allowing such seemingly dangerous features > permit powerful tricks and simpler programming. > I always had the tradition of hating this attitude. I'm a programmer. My program created a big file. Give me the POWER to *DELETE* *MY* *FILE*!! Too bad Unix doesn't give me enough rope to hang *it*, not just myself. I've learned that "powerful" means "wrong". A feature is called "powerful" when: * it's not directly related to what anyone would ever need, * but it can be used to approximate useful things, * although you won't get exactly what you want, * and using it will take quite some time, * and noone will understand how it works, * and it will occasionally fail. For example, a dialog saying "print pages x to y" is not powerful (does what you want with no side effects and can't be used for anything else). A much more powerful approach is to filter your document through a sed script, selecting pages x to y, which will only take half a day and only occasionally fail. The same approach can be used for mishandling a variety of problems - a clear proof that it's powerful. > > This is called an upgrade. The process won't crash because the code > is already loaded in memory. Upgrades are harder to handle on Win32 > precisely because it doesn't allow (by default) to replace opened > files. > Yes it will. I'm pretty sure 'cause I've checked a few weeks ago. It won't crash if you overwrite the executable. But it will crash if you overwrite a shared object. By the way, I don't think all Unices do the same thing when it comes to files mapped to the memory of a process.
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