Re: design question, why not always use 'cp --remove-destination'?

On 8/22/06, Frederik Eaton wrote:

On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 06:16:39PM +0300, Krasimir Angelov wrote:

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On 8/22/06, Frederik Eaton wrote:

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Perhaps the "Text file busy" error is Unix-specific, but I can imagine cases where somebody (other than the OS) might open a file with a well-known name and read from various parts of it, and expect it not to change underneath them...

Then he/she may expect that the file will not be suddenly unlinked while he/she is still reading.

I hardly know anything about Windows. Doesn't it have inodes, so I can open a file, unlink it, and continue to read from and write to it?

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The documentation for System.IO says that the implementation should provide single writer - multiple readers locking. When that is the case then copyFile should fail if the target fail is open for reading or writing from someone including the OS. The Unix implementation provides only local locking but the Windows implementation provides system wide locking.

Ah! I understand now. This simply doesn't work under Windows but it makes sense for Unix. I just think that removeFile should be called only on non-Windows OSes.