UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Even "tail -f" can cause these symptoms. More likely that you have a process which periodically writes to the file and sometimes gets caught by the "rm".
If it is a suitable process, maybe consider nulling the file (>filename) instead of deleting it. If this is a standard system file like "wtmp", please tell us. (I have never heard the term "scan file").

It is the output of a drum scanner. The scanner writes the file on the UNIX disk and I copy it to a NT machine. When it is done I have to delete the file to have space for the next scan.

Has the load changed lately on your intergraph station? Now it may be too late to look at since you rebooted...
This issue only happens when files are open... So it leaves you with either write not completed, or copy to NT stayed pending (network issue?).
reset the file to zero size as suggested by methyl may be a good alternative

Depending on the OS version, you can still user fuser. Fire it in against the filesystem, often with flags -duV and it might give you process and userid holding open deleted files.



I hope that this helps.


Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

Keeping things on disk like this is a standard feature on most UNIX systems for a very long time -- files in use won't be freed from disk until they're actually closed.

If you don't have fuser, but your system has /proc/fd/, you might try looking for processes which have files open that have zero hardlinks. Those will be open files that're no longer present on the filesystem...

There is /proc on the machine but no /proc/fd. In /proc there are files like 00345. Are they to delete?

Do not delete files from /proc . Judging from Google results this is likely to be unix System V release 3.

You need to find the process which is holding the file open.
You mentioned a process which copies the file to a Windows NT server. How does that work?