Re: SCSI Woes

Bryn Paul Arnold Jones (bpaj@gytha.demon.co.uk)
Wed, 19 Jun 1996 01:13:36 +0100 (BST)


On Tue, 18 Jun 1996, Marco Mariani wrote:
>
> Excuse me, I'm sure I'm by no means worthy of even thinking about posting
> such a dumb question to the list, but what does happen to the running
> program if I unlink the file? Should I just see the program dumping core
> or what?
>

No, it's not a dumb question. The disk space used by a file is only
released to be recycled when all references to it are gone, this includes
hard links, and file descriptors. Some programs exploite this, and have
tempary files open, and unlinked, this way, as soon as the program exits the
tempary files are released, and don't hang around waisting space it also
leads to files being deleted, but with there deletion time set to zero
(ie they've been unlinked, but the disk space hasn't been released, so
the deletion time can't be set), you only see complants about this from
fsck, and only after an improper shutdown, as zero deletion time is
valid, but not considered so on a clean fs (well that or you deleted
something on 00:00:00 GMT 1 Jan 1970 ;).

> Marco
>
Bryn

--
PGP key pass phrase forgotten,   \ Overload -- core meltdown sequence 
again :(                          |            initiated.
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                                |  blank, apart from this text ;-)
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