Re: rm problem: Directory not empty

["James R. Phillips" <antiskid56-cygwin at yahoo dot com>]

Brian Dessent wrote:

>Any programs still using the file will continue to do so
>obliviously, until the last open handle is closed at which point the
>inode is deleted and the file is actually gone.  This allows the system
>to e.g. replace in-use libraries and then just restart any services that
>were using that library.

Hmm, that _is_ informative.  I've been wondering for some time how that could
possibly work as well as it seems to on Debian (live library replacements).

However, the most common situation in which I experience this problem is when I
leave a shell window open somewhere with current directory set to include some
part of the path I am trying to delete.  And in this case, AFAICT, *nix refuses
to delete, just as windows does.

I've also seen badly behaving windows programs, which refuse to "let go" of a
directory once they have used a file in it, until the program is explicitly
closed.  This is most annoying, as you have to keep closing program windows
until suddenly you guess right, the directory is freed, and can be deleted.

But thanks for answering my original question.

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