Re: [9fans] Ephase question.

[Charles Forsyth <forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk>]

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so if i completely remove a file that someone is executing, it continues to work,
but if i copy into a file that remains and someone is executing it, it fails.

makes perfect sense to me.

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From: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Ephase question.
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 02:13:08 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0208130206400.1501-100000@weyl.math.psu.edu>



On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Russ Cox wrote:

> > > - Unix' solution of making the remove fail with "file busy"; it was
> > > always inconvenient and confusing.  They use that one for in use
> > > executables.
> >
> > I haven't seen a version of unix do this one for a while (as in decades).
> > The remove succeeds, the file goes away when the last reference does (but
> > you have to have inodes ...). But maybe there is some version of Unix
> > you're referencing I'm not familiar with -- there's a lot of possibilities
> > out there nowadays ...
>
> i've seen it recently on either freebsd or linux,
> in the case of trying to remove or perhaps overwrite
> binaries that were being executed at the time.
> it was definitely a binary rather than a normal file.

Overwrite - sure.  Remove - nope.