Hallo, Paul!

*** Am Dienstag 29. August 1995 um 22:07 schrieb Paul Edwards an Philipp Thomas:

 PT>> just another example of unixish dirty file system hacks, like doing
 PT>> unlink() on an open file :)

 PE> To serve what purpose?  Or are you just renaming "bugs" to
 PE> "unixish dirty file system hacks" to make it sound more like
 PE> the people knew what they were doing, instead of pointing out
 PE> that a bug is a bug is a bug?  BFN.  Paul.

You can debate about whether this is WAD or BUG. When unlinking an open
file it vanishes from all mounted filesystems and only the internal
subsystems have access to the disk space via the stored inode number. This
is quite nice for security reasons when you don't want _anyone_ to access
the contents of the file.

As soon as the last reference to the file is closed the file is removed
physically, i.e. the space is freed on the volume.


Tschau...Thomas

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