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Re: Bug in rm -r with locked files


Interesting - It's more important to "force" a square into a circle and
uphold a "standard"
than it is to deliver common sense "usability". MSWin is inherently
"UN-posix"  by nature,
and while I applaud trying to make a "silk (posix) purse" out of it, if it
means rendering the most
basic of utilities fundamentally unusable - then what is the point??? As I
posted earlier, I cannot
use rm -rf in a script and must resort to the native "del" cmd because rm
-rf hangs when it encounters
a locked file. Most of the files can be recovered with either attrib or
chmod xxx * and then the
script can continue. But in order for that to happen, there has to be an
ERROR MSG - something
I can get from the MS del cmd - even though I'd rather use rm. It's all
lost on me ...

Brian Kelly





"Randall R Schulz" <rrschulz@cris.com>@cygwin.com on 01/21/2003 02:25:19 PM

Sent by:    cygwin-owner@cygwin.com


To:    cygwin@cygwin.com
cc:     (bcc: Brian Kelly/WTC1/Empire)

Subject:    Re: Bug in rm -r with locked files


Shankar,

At 11:05 2003-01-21, Shankar Unni wrote:
>lhall@pop.ma.ultranet.com wrote:
>>You may find the 'handle' utility from www.sysinternal.com a handy
>>(no pun intended :-) ) tool for determining which files are opened
>>by which processes.
>
>I don't think that was the primary issue.  The issue was that if a process
>is using a directory as its working directory (chdir()'ed into it), "rm
>-rf" goes into an infinite loop attempting to remove the directory (rather
>than print an error and move on).
>
>Definitely a bug, and still a bug.


That, in fact, is a presumption. The Cygwin principals are aware of this
behavior and it is not new. It is a trade-off required to get POSIX-like
behavior from the "unlink" system call as emulated by Cygwin.

Please review the discussions under the subject "Infinite Loop In "rm -fr"
When Busy File Encountered" on April 6, 2002 and "REPOST: unlink semantics"
from April 10, 2002.

I'm not an expert, but this has come up more than once (I initiated the
April 6 round of discussions) and the upshot is that given the mismatch of
API semantics between Windows and POSIX, this is the best that can be done.


Randall Schulz


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"Empire Health Choice Inc." made the following
 annotations on 01/21/2003 02:43:30 PM
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