in reply to Re: Self Deletion
in thread Self Deletion

You can rm running executables on AIX 4 (AIX 3 is really old). You just can't cp over them or recompile over them. A common thing to do in AIX Makefiles is to rm them first before recompiling.

FWIW, unlinking a running executable is usually only a problem when it resides on an NFS server, since in that case the code really does go away immediately (leading to interesting results). So I imagine this is pretty much the same on HPUX since it is really just a way to keep someone from hurting themselves, but not an absolute necessity. Of course I'm probably mistaken...

bluto

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Re: Re: Re: Self Deletion
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 07, 2001 at 20:37 UTC
    You can rm running executables on AIX 4 (AIX 3 is really old). You just can't cp over them or recompile over them. A common thing to do in AIX Makefiles is to rm them first before recompiling.

    It's not just AIX, it's most unices. When a program is run, part of the program is mmap'd so copying over the file would corrupt the program's memory (whereas deleting the file would not, due to the way unix handles open files with a 0 link count).
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