Just so you know, this is a very unportable Unix behavior. Under AIX 3 (poss. 4) and under HPUX you can't delete a file that's being exec'd -- whether it's a loadable object file or a script.

I wrote a user-space filesystem caching program for Ford Motor, and one of the problems was trying to delete (cache out) a file in use. The support scripts for the caching program often had to be removed and couldn't.

The error returned by unlink is ETXTBUSY. A workaround is to detect ETXTBUSY on unlink, and move the file up a directory in the tree with link, and then delete the original with unlink. The i-node isn't removed (and this makes the OS happy) but the directory is emptied (and this makes the programmer happy).

In reply to Re: Self Deletion by clintp
in thread Self Deletion by Anonymous Monk

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