Re: Tor cleverness?

[Seth David Schoen <schoen@xxxxxxx>]

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