Richard S. Crawford wrote: > richard@seamus: ~/music/Howard Shore > $ rm -rf THELO~1H/ > rm: cannot remove `THELO~1H//Concerning Hobbits.mp3': Text file busy Turns out that this is on a Samba drive. For what it's worth, I believe that this is significant. Unix natively is quite happy to let you unlink (= remove from the file tree) an open file: a number of programs explicitly use this to ensure that their temporary files go away when they finish. [1] SMB / CIFS, coming from the DOS / OS/2 / Windows world, doesn't have this concept. When a file is open, it's kept busy, and you can't delete it. It looks like Linux and rm understand this concept for SMB shares. It's the approach that causes the fewest problems, but it is still not pure Unix. James. [1] Create a temporary file, immediately unlink it, and then keep using it. Doesn't matter whether the program crashes or the power is pulled: when the program finishes, the file is gone. -- James Wilkinson | Really, *really* bad headlines: Exeter Devon UK | Drunks Get Nine Months in Violin Case E-mail address: james | Iraqi Head Seeks Arms @westexe.demon.co.uk | British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands
