On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 08:00:25PM +0000, Jonathan Stowe wrote: > > On Mon, 2006-12-18 at 20:11 +0100, A. Pagaltzis wrote: > > * Yossi Kreinin <[email protected]> [2006-12-18 18:35]: > > > I'm a programmer. My program created a big file. Give me the > > > POWER to *DELETE* *MY* *FILE*!! > > > > On Windows, you'd be told the file is busy and it wouldn't be > > deleted. > > Which is so obviously totally inferior to removing the name of the file > from the directory but leaving the file to fill up the disk. Sure it > allows you to do big, clever, obscure and POWERFUL things that mere > mortals can't understand, but it doesn't help in freeing space on the > disk.
Yes, but then on Unix I could also mount another filesystem over the directory tree containing the large file, or chroot down such that the file is now out of reach above /, so there are other hateful ways to stop you having free disk space. (Which reminds me, if on the other hand, if you want space when only root has it, I wonder if you can still mmap a sparse file as a non-priv user and then write data to your new address space and have it fill real disk. That was fun. VM systems get very very confused.) Nicholas Clark
