Odd question re linux & caches

[Liam Proven]

On 30 September 2012 20:57, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> Greetings;
>
> I was just bumfuzzled for several hours, here is the scenario:
>
> I have an old TRS-80 Color Computer 3 in the basement, hooked up to this
> box by 2 separate methods.
>
> One is a very high speed (for the coco) network over its bitbanger port at
> 115 kilobaud.
>
> Two is a shell (like bash) running on its hardware serial port, so I have a
> remote login that doesn't support any gfx commands.
>
> The first is called drivewire by its author and can access a file
> containing an image of one of the coco's disks.
>
> So, I 'touched' a file on this linux box, coupled to it by way of
> drivewire's mount facility, formatted this image as a disk, and then wrote
> a boot floppy image to it.  I could unmount/eject it, and remount/insert it
> and all the data was still there.
>
> BUT, when I looked at it with linux 2 hours later with an ls -l, it was
> still a zero length file!  I had to access it with hexedit to verify that
> the data was there & looked ok.  After that, the proper file length of a
> bit over 161k was then shown by an ls -l.
>
> Is there some switch I can set which will cause linux to refresh its cache
> when a file has been opened, written to and closed again?
>


Standard Unix behaviour, AIUI. Has the happy side-effect that you can
delete a file and it won't actually go anywhere until all open file
handles to it are closed. This means that you can update the binaries
of a program and it will keep running quite happily. That is why you
can update your Linux box without rebooting it unless the kernel has
changed, so really, it is a good thing and it's not going to change.
It's the reason Linux needs so much fewer reboots than Windows does.

-- 
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