Tor cleverness?

[Geoff Down]

Thank you very much for the comprehensive replies.
GD
On 17 Nov 2008, at 20:05, Seth David Schoen wrote:

> dr._no at cool.ms 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 at eff.org
> Electronic Frontier Foundation                    http://www.eff.org/
> 454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA  94110     1 415 436 9333 x107