Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Message-Id: <5.2.0.9.2.20030122090107.01ebe5a0@pop3.cris.com> X-Sender: rrschulz AT pop3 DOT cris DOT com Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 09:08:46 -0800 To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com From: Randall R Schulz Subject: Re: Bug in rm -r with locked files In-Reply-To: References: <3E2E5EEA DOT 3000606 AT polyspace DOT com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 08:44 2003-01-22, Igor Pechtchanski wrote: >On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Gael Mulat wrote: > > > OK. If I summurize all that has been said, this problem is > > well-known but has no solution in a near future. > > > > But a workaround would be very useful for people (me and Brian > > Kelly, for instance) who use plenty of rm -rf in cross-platform shell > > scripts. > > > > Thanks to Shankar Unni, I have mine: I didn't noticed that only rm > > -rf had the trouble, and not rm -r. > > > > So my workaround will be to replace all the '/bin/rm -rf dir' by > > 'chmod -R +w dir; /bin/rm -r dir'. The semantic is not exactly the same > > (especially on write-protected directories), but that will allow my > > scripts to work well... > > > > Thanks everybody. > > Gael. > >A suggestion: > >'/bin/find dir -depth -exec /bin/chmod +w {} \; -exec /bin/rm -r {} \;' >might work, and will only parse the tree once... It will invoke chmod and >rm multiple times, though, but that's a tradeoff. > Igor Igor, I think we've drifted off the problem here. This isn't a issue of file modes interfering with file removal, its an interaction with window's "locking" of files that are in-use (open). And as the discussion from last April showed, not all in-use states interfered with removal via Cygwin unlink(). While we were having trouble getting my original problem reproduced, I decided to write a Java program that opened a file and kept it open. Something about the way Java opened files triggered the problem where not all other uses did. Perhaps it was just a Cygwin (non-interfering) vs. non-Cygwin (interfering) use of the file. I don't know. I don't know what was the exact diagnosis of the problem at the level of the Cygwin unlink code. Chris January might know. Randall Schulz -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/