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    SubjectRe: Deleting large files
    >  Suppose you had an N GB file that just filled up the disk. You now
    > delete it, but get control back before it is really deleted. You
    > now start to write a new file that will eventually just fill up
    > the disk. [...]

    That argument ought to stop right there. If you believe that deleting a
    file will necessarily and immediately give you back the space, then you
    are wrong in the current state of the affairs already.

    NFS does not do that -- in fact, I don't believe any file system does that
    unless you can guarantee at least that no other process or the kernel has
    that file open; AFS did not do that last I looked a decade ago; versioning
    file systems do not; journaling file systems might not. File systems that
    support undelete do not do that. In short: assuming such a thing is a
    bug in need of a fix today.

    Right now, unlink is a commonly used syscall with unbounded response
    time. If your GUI program deletes a file, the GUI generally locks up until
    the kernel feels like returning -- that is certainly not how you get a smooth
    user experience. Forking a process to do the deletion (a) is pathetic,
    (b) is not currently done, and (c) does not work: you cannot get a result
    right away, i.e., you lose error handling.

    Morten


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