Re: How do I unlock a file ? / SOLVED !


On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 07:45 +0200, Mario Vukelic wrote:

I believe the reason for the existence of rmdir in addition to rm is a
safety consideration: if you use rmdir, you can be absolutely sure (even
when running it from a script) that a directory will _only_ be removed
if it contains no files.

rmdir historically existed before the recursive flag to rm. In the very
early days of Unix (1970s), you had to manually empty a directory before
deleting the directory. rmdir was originally a setuid program with root
privileges. Only root could add or remove files which were directories.
Later on the BSD folks added a rmdir() system call which allowed
ordinary users to remove their own directories, but they still had to be
empty.

If you could delete non-empty directories without deleting the
referenced files, you can end up with files without a reference in any
directory which would be a bad thing. Explicitly deleting the file
references insures the file reference count in the file inode gets
decremented correctly. The "-r" flag to rm automates what was before a
manual process.
--
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
smoot@xxxxxxx
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 451 9005

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