On Thursday 09 June 2005 03:11, Dipti Pawar wrote: > Hi > After firing the rm filename command is the file deleted immediately by > kernel or > does it lists such files and then delete them from system after a some > specific interval? The 'rm' command (or unlink() system call, which it uses) just removes the file *name* and decrements a reference count on the inode of the file. Only when the reference count goes to 0 is the inode freed. The reference count includes hard links in the filesystem as well as all open()ed and mmap()ed references as well. When the inode is freed, there will still be some delay before that change gets propagated to the disk. As for the shred command that was mentioned, it won't work very well on certain types of filesystems (e.g. ones that use a Journal). The manpage has more restrictions. -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
