In Unix (or even Linux:-), it's perfectly legal to delete a file while it's open. If that's the last link to the file, it will go away once the last program that has it open exits.
Problem is, NFS is stateless - the NFS server isn't keeping track of what the clients are doing. So NFS can't truly handle that particular Unix behavior. The clients work around the problem by renaming the file like that and deferring the delete until nothing on the client has it open. There are only two problems with that: 1) it's not totally invisible, so people ask questions about it 2) if the client crashes while "deleted" files are open, those .nfs* files never get deleted. To deal with (2), many NFS servers have a cron job that hunts down files named .nfs* that haven't been accessed in more than a certain number of days, and deletes them. That isn't perfect, because if a client program was still running but went too long (say more than a week) between accesses to that file, the server would assume the file had been abandoned and would delete it. In practice, that apparently is not a problem very often. So you can either: * ignore the problem, it'll probably go away eventually * use lsof or something like it on the client to figure out what program has the files open, and kill it (only do this if those files are huge and you're running out of space) Technically you could also log into the server and delete the files there, but then the client would start getting "stale NFS file handle" errors or something like that, because it was expecting that file to still be there. Usually the best bet is to just ignore files like that... -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
