rm-ing files with open file descriptors
Quoted 4 lines · Ken Brownfield
One nasty side-effect is space allocation -- after unlinking a file and writing to it, you can fill the disk without the file showing up in 'ls' or 'du', etc. Hard to debug. Stronghold on Solaris used to do this with log files -- HUP did not discard the old FDs.
Hell, syslogd on Linux used to do that ;)
Linux's /proc/PID/fd/* will (nowadays) tell you the path/name of files that have been unlinked but have active file descriptors, which at least makes this less painful to track down *once you think of it*.
--
Hank Leininger <[email protected]>