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