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

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From: Yossi Kreinin
Subject: Re: Delete a file THAT big? Surely you are joking.
Date: 16:51 on 18 Dec 2006
>>
>>I removed it using rm. I don't know what you mean.
> 
> 
> That on Unix, a file is not actually remooved as long as there is an opened
> filehandle poiinting to it. So if you remove a log while the program writing
> it is still running, you can't free space. You must restart the program so
> the pending filehandle is closed and the file removed (and the space freed).
> Another solution is to truncate the file (see trunc(3)):
> 
>     $ >file
> 

This is very sweet of Unix.

* Why is it sensible to allow to truncate a file someone has opened?
* Especially if you don't allow to remove such files?
* Or, more specifically, you ALLOW to remove such files, but not to reclaim the 
disk space?
* And how am I supposed to know which process is using the file?

For instance, Unix will let you overwrite a shared object used by a process, and 
the process will crash. Isn't it *hateful*?

There's stuff above here

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