unexpected softupdate inconsistency

[Michael Nottebrock]

On Thursday 11 March 2004 01:31, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On 2004-Mar-11 11:14:01 +1100, Gregory Bond <gnb at itga.com.au> wrote:
> >The key phrase here is "What does vim do here _that rm doesn't_?"
> >
> >If vim is also just using unlink() then rm can (theoretically) do the job
> > just as well.  It seems like really odd advice to say "use vim because rm
> > can't do the job."  If this were in any way true, then I'd call that a
> > serious bug in rm.
>
> If the filename to delete includes non-printing or magic-to-the-shell
> characters (and especially ones with the top bit set), it can be
> difficult to specify the filename as a command-line argument to rm(1).
> In these cases, directory-editing modes in editors (or a scripting
> language like perl) can be very helpful.
>
> This isn't a bug in rm(1) and is not necessarily a bug in the shell.
> It is fairly common when [l]users use GUI tools to create files or
> use sockaddr_in addresses on AF_UNIX sockets - which I've seen done.

However, I can confirm from experience that rm (-f) won't remove a file that's 
affected by a filesystem error like the one described in this thread. You'll 
just get back "<filename>: bad file descriptor" and that's it. The last time 
this happened to me, the affected file was a directory called "tmp" - hardly 
any weird characters in that one.

-- 
   ,_,   | Michael Nottebrock               | lofi at freebsd.org
 (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve     | http://www.freebsd.org
   \u/   | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org
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