This is a report about a small bug in the manpage for the
unlink(2) system call. I found the bug in my Ubuntu 10.10
distribution; its Colophon says: "This page is part of
release 3.23 of the Linux man-pages project".
The bug is also present in the on-line manpages at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html
The current version of the page says (under ERRORS):
> EBUSY (not on Linux)
> The file pathname cannot be unlinked because it is being
> used by the system or another process and the
> implementation considers this an error.
But if you look in the kernel source file fs/namei.c
at routine may_delete() you'll see two occasions where
an EBUSY is generated. So the above "not on Linux" is wrong.
I suggest that this '(not on Linux)' be removed. It may
also improve the page if the commentary is reworded to give a
better description of the two situations. Something along
the lines of:
> The file pathname cannot be unlinked because it is being used
> by the system, e.g. if some (relative) rootdir is mounted upon it,
> or because the NFS client software created it to represent an
> active but otherwise nameless inode ("NFS silly renamed").
Just FYI: the NFS silly rename (you'll find this term mentioned
in the kernel source code) is described at:
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/#section_d
under section D2. The reason I found this manpage bug is because
I stumbled upon one of these silly renamed files, and an strace
of the rm-command revealed the EBUSY return errno.
I am not a native English speaker, so my text can certainly
be improved upon.
Regards,
--
Hendrik-Jan Thomassen <hjt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
AT Computing
Linux/UNIXperts,
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