From: Jonathan Stowe Date: 20:00 on 18 Dec 2006 Subject: [Fwd: Re: Delete a file THAT big? Surely you are joking.] On Mon, 2006-12-18 at 20:11 +0100, A. Pagaltzis wrote: > * Yossi Kreinin <yossi.kreinin@xxxxxxxx.xxx> [2006-12-18 18:35]: > > I'm a programmer. My program created a big file. Give me the > > POWER to *DELETE* *MY* *FILE*!! > > On Windows, you'd be told the file is busy and it wouldn't be > deleted. Which is so obviously totally inferior to removing the name of the file from the directory but leaving the file to fill up the disk. Sure it allows you to do big, clever, obscure and POWERFUL things that mere mortals can't understand, but it doesn't help in freeing space on the disk. The real windows hate would be that it doesn't tell you which program it is that has the file open, nor provide any tools out of the box that would help you find that out, but hey it least it has an API that can do that reasonably quickly - on Unix you have to grovel through the filesystem or the kernel's list of file descriptors to find that out... /J\
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 20:04 on 18 Dec 2006 Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Delete a file THAT big? Surely you are joking.] On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 08:00:25PM +0000, Jonathan Stowe wrote: > > On Mon, 2006-12-18 at 20:11 +0100, A. Pagaltzis wrote: > > * Yossi Kreinin <yossi.kreinin@xxxxxxxx.xxx> [2006-12-18 18:35]: > > > I'm a programmer. My program created a big file. Give me the > > > POWER to *DELETE* *MY* *FILE*!! > > > > On Windows, you'd be told the file is busy and it wouldn't be > > deleted. > > Which is so obviously totally inferior to removing the name of the file > from the directory but leaving the file to fill up the disk. Sure it > allows you to do big, clever, obscure and POWERFUL things that mere > mortals can't understand, but it doesn't help in freeing space on the > disk. Yes, but then on Unix I could also mount another filesystem over the directory tree containing the large file, or chroot down such that the file is now out of reach above /, so there are other hateful ways to stop you having free disk space. (Which reminds me, if on the other hand, if you want space when only root has it, I wonder if you can still mmap a sparse file as a non-priv user and then write data to your new address space and have it fill real disk. That was fun. VM systems get very very confused.) Nicholas Clark
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 20:20 on 18 Dec 2006 Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Delete a file THAT big? Surely you are joking.] > Which is so obviously totally inferior to removing the name of the file > from the directory but leaving the file to fill up the disk. Absolutely, because 99.44% of the time the program will be gone within seconds anyway, and of the remaining 0.56% of the time 99.4% of the time the program isn't creating a large file and leaving the file NAME in place just serves to make the program fail to start because the old hung copy you can't kill without rebooting because of an interaction with hateful.dll that would crash the system anyway has the file open... Seriously. The situation where you have a long running program holding a large file open AND you're short on disk space is the rare case. Optimizing for the rare case is hateful.
From: Bruce Richardson Date: 02:36 on 20 Dec 2006 Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Delete a file THAT big? Surely you are joking.] On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 08:00:25PM +0000, Jonathan Stowe wrote: > > The real windows hate would be that it doesn't tell you which program it > is that has the file open, nor provide any tools out of the box that > would help you find that out, but hey it least it has an API that can do > that reasonably quickly - on Unix you have to grovel through the > filesystem or the kernel's list of file descriptors to find that out... Meh. Windows Filesystem stupidity knows no end. http://itsbruce.hates-software.com/ Hate, hate, hate.
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