On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 02:33:54PM +1000, skaller wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 02:04, Damien Doligez wrote:
> > On May 26, 2004, at 17:50, skaller wrote:
> > 
> > > This is mathematically an ill formed statement.
> > >
> > > You cannot say P(x), when x doesn't exist,
> > > for a predicate P. That could lead to a contradiction.
> > 
> > And yet... You can open a file that doesn't exist.
> 
> No you can't. You can call the open function
> with a string for any string. For some strings
> a file will be opened. For other strings
> no file is opened, you get an error.

Well.  You can have an open file that doesn't exist but you can't open a
file that doesn't exist.

If a file is unlinked after it's been opened, it is no longer accessible
from any name but its blocks are not reclaimed until after every process
that has it open has closed it.  Thus the open fd remains valid.

(these semantics may differ on non-POSIX platforms)

-- John

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