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Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 11:25:19 -0800
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com>
Subject: Re: Bug in rm -r with locked files
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Shankar,

At 11:05 2003-01-21, Shankar Unni wrote:
>lhall AT pop DOT ma DOT ultranet DOT 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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