With respect to the 'Infinte Loop in "rm -fr"' thread, I believe the current semantics of unlink on Cygwin to be inconsistent with SuSv2.
SuSv2 specifies the following: The unlink() function removes a link to a file. If path names a symbolic link, unlink() removes the symbolic link named by path and does not affect any file or directory named by the contents of the symbolic link. Otherwise, unlink() removes the link named by the pathname pointed to by path and decrements the link count of the file referenced by the link. When the file's link count becomes 0 and no process has the file open, the space occupied by the file will be freed and the file will no longer be accessible. If one or more processes have the file open when the last link is removed, the link will be removed before unlink() returns, but the removal of the file contents will be postponed until all references to the file are closed. Cygwin's current implementation of unlink is not consistent with the following part: "If one or more processes have the file open when the last link is removed, the link will be removed before unlink() returns, but the removal of the file contents will be postponed until all references to the file are closed." At present Cygwin delays not only the removal of the file contents, but also the removal of the link (i.e. the directory entry). This causes problems with programs that expect the post-condition of unlink to be that the directory entry for the specified file is removed if unlink returns 0. rm is one example of such a program and this inconsistency is the cause of the "infinite loop" problem reported in the other thread. As a suggested fix, path_conv::check could returns ENOENT for a file if it appears in the delqueue. I would submit a patch for this, but I am not 100% sure how the delqueue is protected from multiple threads accessing it at the same time. Regards Chris -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
