Hello Hendrik, On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Hendrik Jan Thomassen <hjt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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. Thanks very much for this report. For man-pages-3.33, I applied the change below. Cheers, Michael --- a/man2/unlink.2 +++ b/man2/unlink.2 @@ -69,11 +69,14 @@ did not allow search permission. (See also .BR path_resolution (7).) .TP -.BR EBUSY " (not on Linux)" +.BR EBUSY The file .I pathname cannot be unlinked because it is being used by the system -or another process and the implementation considers this an error. +or another process; +for example, it is a mount point +or the NFS client software created it to represent an +active but otherwise nameless inode ("NFS silly renamed"). .TP .B EFAULT .I pathname -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
