Text file busy

[Mikko Työläjärvi]

On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Scott M. Likens wrote:

> On Thu, 2003-09-04 at 07:44, Paul Richards wrote:
> > Overwriting a file that's currently executing results in a "Text file
> > busy" error.
> >
> > When did this start happening?
> >
> > This was something that was fixed way back on FreeBSD but it seems to be
> > a problem again.
> >
> > Paul.
>
> this "feature" has always existed in FreeBSD for as long as I remember.
>
> Of course there are ways to bypass this "feature" but it's there for
> your protection.  You shouldn't be upgrading a program that's in
> resident memory.  That's like trying to reinstall X while running in X.
> You're just asking for problems.
>
> turnoff postfix, install the new version and be happy.
>
> Every single 'flavor' of Unix/Unices has always had this feature.  I've
> seen it on HP-UX box's on Solaris Servers, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
> FreeBSD.  Maybe you wern't paying attention but, that is one of those
> things I think should fall under duh, i shouldn't do that it might make
> things crash hard.

SunOS 4 let you overwrite binaries for running programs, which almost
surely made them crash.  HP-UX has the annoying misfeature that you
cannot even unlink a binary used for paging.

The way to do it is to mv/rm te target before installing the new
version.  AFAIK install(1) will do the right thing.

If you are into foot shooting, you can always overwrite a shared lib,
such as libc.so, and watch (almost) all your programs crash and burn :-)

   $.02,
   /Mikko