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

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From: Peter da Silva
Subject: Re: Delete a file THAT big? Surely you are joking.
Date: 13:03 on 19 Dec 2006

> I don't see a "duplicate writer".

The shell and cat both have the file open for writing.

> % sh longrunningprogram.sh > /tmp/stuff &
> % rm /tmp/stuff
> /tmp/stuff: file is used by longrunningprogram.sh [pid 134]

That leads to temp files NOT getting deleted when they should.

> What I was saying is that the "two-step" deletion (unlink, reclaim) is 
> only marginally useful for creating temporary files.

It's incredibly useful. The fact that you don't have to wait for a file 
to be closed before you can delete it makes all kinds of things that 
are a total pain in the neck on other platforms (upgrades, for example) 
Just Work makes the very idea of getting rid of it utterly hateful.

>  So the mechanism involved shouldn't get in the way when I do other 
> things.

The only time it gets in the way is in the rarest of cases, when you 
have a long running program holding open a huge file and you can't kill 
it, *and* you made the mistake of deleting it because you were in a 
hurry to free space.

There's stuff above here

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