7 Aug
2019
7 Aug
'19
4:35 a.m.
On Thu, 1 Aug 2019, Noel Chiappa wrote:
Maybe the application was written by a LISP
programmer? :-)
(Not really, of course; it was probably just someone who didn't know much
about Unix. They had a list of system calls, and 'unlink' probably said '
only
works on directories when the caller is root', so...)
I dimly recall that there was a little-documented utility /etc/unlink
which did just that; it was probably not on all systems, but was on our
CCI Power 6/32.
I only discovered their incompetence at the next reboot, when I had to
clean up all the orphaned (but temporary) files that were left behind
because [idn]check went berserk (we didn't have fsck back then).
-- Dave