Infinite Loop In "rm -fr" When Busy File Encountered

[Randall R Schulz <rrschulz at cris dot com>]

Greetings,

I have encountered a problem in "rm" when used with the "-f" and "-r" 
options and a busy and hence unremovable file is encountered.

When "rm -fr" encounters a busy and hence unremovable file, it goes into an 
infinite loop consuming as much CPU time as it can get until it is forcibly 
terminated. The error is completely repeatable as long as the file remains 
busy by virtue of being open in another program.

The file system is NTFS and the mount is binmode. The system is Windows 
2000 Pro with SP2 and security patches installed.

This is an up-to-date Cygwin installation that is exhibiting no other 
anomalous behavior.

In reference to the attached "cygcheck -rs" output, this happened on "C:" 
"/cygdrive/c" (reached via a symlink "/c -> /cygdrive/c").


% rm --version
rm (fileutils) 4.1
Written by Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, Richard Stallman, and Jim Meyering.

Copyright (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.



My hunch, unencumbered by the source code, is that the directory access 
libraries as implemented in Cygwin / Windows is, in some sense, "dynamic" 
(as opposed to a statically built "snapshot" that is acquired once and kept 
internally) and hence keeps presenting rm with the same unsuccessfully 
removed and unremovable file over and over again.


Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA

Attachment: cygcheck-rs-2002-04-06.txt
Description: Text document

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