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

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2006/12/18]

From: Nicholas Clark
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Delete a file THAT big? Surely you are joking.]
Date: 20:04 on 18 Dec 2006
On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 08:00:25PM +0000, Jonathan Stowe wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 2006-12-18 at 20:11 +0100, A. Pagaltzis wrote:
> > * Yossi Kreinin <yossi.kreinin@xxxxxxxx.xxx> [2006-12-18 18:35]:
> > > I'm a programmer. My program created a big file. Give me the
> > > POWER to *DELETE* *MY* *FILE*!!
> > 
> > On Windows, you'd be told the file is busy and it wouldn't be
> > deleted. 
> 
> Which is so obviously totally inferior to removing the name of the file
> from the directory but leaving the file to fill up the disk. Sure it
> allows you to do big, clever, obscure and POWERFUL things that mere
> mortals can't understand, but it doesn't help in freeing space on the
> disk.

Yes, but then on Unix I could also mount another filesystem over the
directory tree containing the large file, or chroot down such that the file
is now out of reach above /, so there are other hateful ways to stop you
having free disk space.

(Which reminds me, if on the other hand, if you want space when only root
has it, I wonder if you can still mmap a sparse file as a non-priv user
and then write data to your new address space and have it fill real disk.
That was fun. VM systems get very very confused.)

Nicholas Clark

Generated at 03:01 on 20 Dec 2006 by mariachi 0.52