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Roger Searle wrote: | The question: I deleted the .xsession-errors file in konqueror - not | the "move to trash" option, but the "delete" option. the machine | continued to think it had zero available space on that partition until I | restarted.
As long as there are processes accessing a file, the file itself exists on disk. When you "delete" it, you remove the link from the directory to the file itself. The space used is reclaimed once there are no directory entries *and* no file descriptors open on the file. Otherwise you'd have to reboot the computer whenever you installed a new version of a running program, just like Windows.
If you want to reclaim the space, you need to clear the file contents, rather than removing the directory entry. One possibility before deleting the file would have been:
$ : > ~/.xsession-errors
Now that you've deleted the file, that's a bit harder. You could log out, so that all the processes writing to the file exit, or you could find a reference to the file in /proc/*/fd/ and overwrite that.
- -- "Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted." ~ -- Fred Allen -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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