[OpenAFS-devel] Re: Breaking callbacks on unlink

[chas williams - CONTRACTOR]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:43:47 -0600
Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net> wrote:

> In general? I think it's a very useful behavior for temporary file
> storage that doesn't linger. If you make a temporary file and just
> unlink when you're done, it'll stick around if the process is killed
> halfway through what it's doing. If you open, and then unlink, it goes
> away if the proc is killed even if you don't cleanup properly. (The
> OpenAFS salvager was semirecently made to use this kind of functionality
> for its temp storage, iirc.)

this isnt often used.  mostly because it hides the file from someone
who doesn't know that the program actually does this.  in some cases, i
would almost consider this rogue behavior because you can just fill up
the filesystem and in the case of some programs, ignore write errors
and keep it filled until someone figures out what is going on with
lsof.  draw gun, shoot foot.

> For the case in AFS, it's a little weirder to be sharing such files
> across machines, but it's possible.

i think the case of dso's is a reasonable argument for consistent (and
in this case unix/posix-like) behavior of unlinked files across clients.
oddly enough, if you are using emt you wont see this problem because of
the way it handled upgrades to programs/shared libs.  possibly, just to
avoid this inconsistent behavior.