Re: Rename atomicity

[Assar Westerlund]

Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:
> "Derek R. Price" <address@hidden> wrote:
> | Anyone ever tried to come up with a test for whether a rename across
> | directories on the same file system/partition is atomic?  The best I can
> | come up with is to rename a large file in a background process and try
> | and kill it real quick, but I don't think that would remain reliable
> | across a wide variety of platforms and hardware.
> 
> Do you know of a system on which such a use of rename is _not_ atomic?

On ancient Unices rename was done by link+unlink, but I doubt that any
of these old systems had a rename() system call or library function.
4BSD had `atomic' rename().

/assar