the pause that removes

[andrew clarke]

On Thu 2009-03-12 22:37:13 UTC-0700, prad (prad at towardsfreedom.com) wrote:

> one of the neat things i've found about freebsd vs linux is the
> 'instantaneous' rm.
> 
> when you remove a large file or a substantial directory, freebsd does
> it right away ard you get your prompt back, while with every linux i've
> tried, you wait and wait and wait.
> 
> i presume freebsd just takes the pointer to the file out so it can be
> overwritten, while may be the linuxes fill stuff with zeros or
> something like that??
> 
> is this instantaneity a result of the ufs file system vs say ext3 or
> reiser?

I've been under the impression that this (fast deletes) had something
to do with the "soft updates" feature of UFS.  Although, the Wikipedia
page doesn't talk about deleting files in particular, so I could be
completely wrong about that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_updates