On Feb 23, 2006, at 8:45 AM, Richard Rhodes wrote:
(I did a classic "rm *" in the wrong telnet session on my pc, pounded ctrl-c real fast, hung onto my seat, looked around, and, found half of the db files gone. Interestingly, the db ran just fine for an hour while we prepared the restore/ recovery!)
A bad feeling I'm sure we've all felt... An 'rm' on an open file will remove its entry from the directory, but the inode will remain until the application closes its file descriptor. Some subsystems use this "trick" for lock files and temp files to intentionally render their activity invisible: you will see no files in the directory, but the directory timestamp and disk monitors sure reflect activity, and disk space sure is being used. Richard Sims
