Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 19 Jun 1996 01:13:36 +0100 (BST) | From | Bryn Paul Arnold Jones <> | Subject | Re: SCSI Woes |
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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. / This space is intentionally left | blank, apart from this text ;-) \____________________________________
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