*BSD News Article 13967


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From: paik@mlo.dec.com (Samuel S. Paik)
Subject: Re: File Truncation Philosophy
Message-ID: <1993Apr3.211204.1723@peavax.mlo.dec.com>
Sender: usenet@peavax.mlo.dec.com (USENET News System)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Alpha Personal Systems Software Group
References: <C4tJ6C.C17@ns1.nodak.edu> <deeken.733841578@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1993 21:12:04 GMT
Lines: 13

In article <deeken.733841578@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de> deeken@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de (Hannes Deeken) writes:
>Why not just arrange it in a way that a process which tries to open
>the file containing the pages of an active process for writing fails
>and finds ETXTBSY in errno?  (Always wondered what this error code is good
>for, if not for this case :)

While this is possible for the local case, it is not possible for NFS.
NFS's rather weak semantics allows some other process to write all
over a file that another process is using for an executable...  Fixing
the local case is doable, but I've been pushing for a more general
solution.  (shared and exclusive file locks)

Sam Paik