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Re: Tor cleverness?



Thank you very much for the comprehensive replies.
GD
On 17 Nov 2008, at 20:05, Seth David Schoen wrote:

dr._no@xxxxxxx writes:

Hi,

I renamed (with 'mv') the file I was sending Tor logs to whilst Tor was
running.
I actually moved it to a different directory.
The log data kept being written to that file. How?

unixoid OSes use file pointers which remain even when you do rm or unlink.
So mv does not change writing to an open file.

There's some more discussion of this kind of thing at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/inode#Implications

Notably, on Unix-like systems including Linux and Mac OS X, a file can
have multiple names or no names at all and still be the "same file",
because the notion of the identity of a file is so thoroughly separated
from the notion of a filename.

--
Seth Schoen
Staff Technologist                                schoen@xxxxxxx
Electronic Frontier Foundation                    http://www.eff.org/
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA  94110     1 415 436 9333 x107