jes@mbio.med.upenn.edu (Joe Smith) (07/15/90)
In trying to snoop on a process doing (apparently) nothing, I found this: $ /usr/etc/pstat -i | awk 'NR==2 || $7 == 0' ILOC IFLAG IDEVICE INO MODE NLK UID SIZE/DEV VFLAG CNT SHC EXC TYPE f0b8f90 R 7, 0 1765 100600 0 131 247 1 0 0 VREG As the 'NLK' field is supposed to be the number of links to the file (and NLK agrees with ls for other files which I could find directory entries for) I am curious as to what a file with no links is and what conditions create them. Joe Smith University of Pennsylvania jes@mbio.med.upenn.edu Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics (215) 898-8348 Philadelphia, PA 19104-6059
falk@peregrine.eng.sun.com (Ed Falk) (07/19/90)
In article <9952@brazos.Rice.edu> jes@mbio.med.upenn.edu (Joe Smith) writes: >As the 'NLK' field is supposed to be the number of links to the file (and >NLK agrees with ls for other files which I could find directory entries >for) I am curious as to what a file with no links is and what conditions >create them. Well, you could delete a file that some program has open. It doesn't go away until it's closed, but it has no links. I suppose that could be it. Many programs that create temporary files delete them right away so the file will go away as soon as the program exits. The advantage to this is that if the program exits abnormally, it won't leave its temporary file lying around. -ed falk, sun microsystems -- sun!falk, falk@sun.com