Last month I had to free a filesystem in HP-UX, took around 12 hours to release the freespace, we tried to speed up by umounting the filesystem, reboot the server but still. On 4/21/06, Kevin Closson <kevinc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > >>>My understanding was that he tested with fuser or lsof and > >>>found no other users using that file? If that is so, then OS > >>>may be little slow in recognizing that the situation has changed. > > Impossible. There is no "sweep up" demon for this (as it were) in > any Unix derivation. There is an OS thread in the bowels of unlink(1) > waiting on a kernel semaphore for the lock on the inode held > (incremented) > by the processes that have file descriptors (or mmap(1)s too of course) > on the file. They close explicitly (e.g., close(1)) or implicitly > (e.g., exit(1) exec(1)) and the ref count decrements and when > the count is right the original poor lingering thread in > unlink(1) gets his deed done. > > I remember one really cherry scenario where (a lot like this > installments on this thread) a customer with a US $1,000,000 > SMP was looking for the sqlplus executable. He blamed the > daylights out of the OS because he didn't understand the semantics > of UFS file manipulation. Lo and behold, we started digging in and > found that his Oracle 7 Oracle home had 1 file in it and that > was ${ORACLE_HOME}/bin/oracle. Can anyone guess how that scenario > came to be? > > rm -fr * > > > > > > >>>-- > >>>Mladen Gogala > >>>http://www.mgogala.com > >>> > >>>-- > >>>//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > >>> > >>> > >>> > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > >