Re: [9fans] Ephase question.

[Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Mon, 12 Aug 2002 presotto@plan9.bell-labs.com 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 just tried this 'cat > /tmp/a' and 'rm' sequence on Linux and it works
as the original poster expected. In the case of executables I think the
principle of least surprise dictates that removing an executable shouldn't
cause running instances of that executable to toss chunks and die. This
kind of behaviour was always a source of major pain for people running
executables from NFS servers.

On the other hand, removing a log file that is growing without bound and
having it just go away is really nice. The old search-and-destroy
technique you have to use on Unix for this type of thing is pretty ugly.

> - Have the remove work but not really remove the file from the directory
> till the current opener goes away.  That's just too confusing.

Ick. No argument there.

I wouldn't give up on your current simple OS just yet. Linux is going to
cross the 250-system-call mark soon, so you have a long way to go before
you're that crazy.

ron