What I meant was, instead of deleting, I tried shredding the file. The result was still consistent reads. However, after the mail from Alex, I increased the filesize to see how much does it cache. Turns out on my system, the read starts returning junk data [that written by shred] after reading 1040 bytes correctly. This is what I understand now, if I delete the file, the kernel guarantees that the file data is preserved till the last reference (in the form of an open filehandle maybe) lingers. If I shred the file, the read succeeds till the buffering is done. This, however sounds wierd to me, what we are essentially saying is that the open/read might not return the latest data!!!! AFAIK the buffer cache/inode cache that the kernel maintains is refreshed as soon the file is modified. Please clarify. Thanks again for the responses. On Jan 3, 2008 6:16 PM, Hayim Shaul <hayim@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, 2008-01-03 at 16:42 +0530, Fasihullah Askiri wrote: > > 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? > > > > What do you mean by re-writing? > Do you mean opening a new file with the same name and writing into it? > > i don't think the new file (necessarily) gets the same inode as the file > you deleted. > More specifically, while the inode of the "deleted" file still exists, > the new inode would most likely to be different. > > -- Keep Running.... And Relish the run... +Fasih _______________________________________________ Ext3-users mailing list Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
