Hi All,

I'm having a strange problem in Linux that I don't understand fully owing to my limited knowledge. I sure hope someone here will be able to clear things up!

I have a setup wherein I login to a Linux server and run a program from the command prompt. The program opens a video file present in the same directory and sends it to a given port on a given IP address. While the file is being sent, I open another terminal; login to the same Linux server and delete the file being sent.
On doing an 'ls', I don't see the file; but the file continues to be sent successfully in the first terminal.
Could someone explain how this is possible?

Regards,
G

Adding on to the question raised in the previous post...

I tried the same experiment as before, but this time logging into a different Linux server.
In this case, after I have deleted the file being sent; I see that my program running in the first terminal can no longer send the file (throws up an error).


The only thing that seems to be different between the 2 Linux servers is the file system:
1st expt, filesystem = yaffs2
2nd expt, filesystem = mvfs

Do you think this makes a difference? Do different filesystems handle file delete differently?

Could you please point me to some links where I can gather more information.

Thanks,
G

Under Unix, deleting a file is really just unlinking its content (inode) from one of its directory entries (filename).
As long as at least one directory entry is pointing to the data, the file content is available.
As long as a file descriptor is still open on the file, the data should still be available.

The data is really freed only after all the processes keeping the file open eventually close it.

mvfs behavior you observe looks broken to me.

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Just that could be due to the buffering done when you open that file for transfer and hence does not get affected when you delete that file.

~Arul.C

That would make sense but this buffering theory is unnecessary.

POSIX compliant filesystems are required to persist the content of a file even after the file has been deleted in this situation.

try it with EXT2 as that is about as generic as it is possable to get

ive never heard of yaffs2 or mvfs
though i guess that yaffs2 stands for "yet another fscking file system"

Thanks for your replies "jlliagre" and others..
Sure helped to explain the behaviour.

For now, I'm going to proceed with the assumption that the mvfs behaviour is a bug.

- G