Re: Deleting large files

From: Jan Engelhardt
Date: Sun May 11 2008 - 06:31:42 EST



On Thursday 2008-05-08 01:14, Morten Welinder wrote:

>> 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. [...]
>
>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;

Iff a process still has the file open, your unlink will succeed immediately
anyway, and the real deallocation takes place when the last process runs
close(). Which shows an interesting fact too: not only unlink can block.
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