Re: Something eating diskspace in Testing

[Roberto C. Sánchez <roberto@debian.org>]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 10:14:25PM -0800, David Christensen wrote:
> 
> Unix has a feature whereby a program can open a file, save the file handle,
> and then unlink the file.  Once unlinked, the file is inaccessible to most
> (all?) other programs, but the originating program can still access the file
> contents via the saved file handle.  When the program closes the file
> handle, the file contents on disk are freed. See unlink(2).
> 
> 
Incidentally, That is one of my favorite sysadmin job interview
scenarios. Hand the candidate a system where a process is doing just as
you describe and see if he/she can identify that as the cause. It as an
excellent way to assess the depth of someone's knowledge of Unix-like
systems.

Regards,

-Roberto

-- 
Roberto C. Sánchez