Thanx for the response. That is why I tried shred-ding the file. I believe that shred overwrites the file inode, if so, shred should have led to failures of read() which is not the case. How does that happen? On Jan 3, 2008 4:19 PM, Alex Bligh <alex@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > --On 3 January 2008 16:00:22 +0530 Fasihullah Askiri > <fasihullah.askiri@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > I have a doubt regarding the behaviour of read() on an ext3 > > filesystem. To elucidate my doubts, I wrote a small program opens a > > file and reads one byte at a time and sleeps for a while. I deleted > > the file while the read was still in progress and I noticed that the > > read still succeeds. How does this work? Does the kernel not free the > > inode when the file is deleted but there is a pending read? To check > > this, instead of deleting, I tried shred-ding the file, the read still > > gets the correct data. > > That's standard UNIX behaviour. The file exists on disk until all > references to it have disappeared (references including the open > file handle). All you do by typing "rm" is delete a reference/link to > it from a particular directory, not (necessarily) delete the file. > That's why the system call is called "unlink". > > Alex > -- Keep Running.... And Relish the run... +Fasih _______________________________________________ Ext3-users mailing list Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
