Hi,

> > The strategy I adopted is to spawn a recursive thread that
> > periodically try to erase the file until success.
> 
> That seems the wrong solution to me. The unlink syscall should work
> immediately or you have another reason why it only works after a
> certain time.

I second David's discomfort.  Have you considered issuing a sync after
the unlink?  For efficiency reasons the OS may not actually be deleting
the file immediately after the unlink; the sync should force it to do it.

Cheers,
Dario Teixeira