[CLUE-Tech] bug in SETI@home 3.08 for Linux

[Keith Hellman]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2003 at 06:12:00AM +0300, George Veskov wrote:
 
> P.S. The file does not show up under normal ls listing or from within
> Konqueror by default. Use 'ls -a' from the command line to see if the file
> is present. Deleting this file immediately frees up the used disk space,
> although I found out that a reboot is necessary for Linux to actually
> begin to utilize that space.

A reboot probably isn't necessary, just bouncing X (CTRL-ALT-BS), or
perhaps bouncing run levels (init 3, init 5) should do it.  If your
setup with graphical logins, then rebooting your machine is equivilent
to bouncing X :^)  You can remove the entry from the filesystem but the
space isn't recycled until all the open file descriptors are closed.  X
still has an open file descriptor to .xsession-errors, hence the need to
bounce X.  DISCLAIMER:  this is the insight of Marcus Hall, which I was
simply fortunate enough to overhear one day ;^).

Depending on your distro, you can probably eliminate the issue by either
making .xsession-errors a fifo (man mkfifo) or a symbolic link to
/dev/null.  It may take some script hacking unfortunately.

-- 
Keith Hellman                             #include <disclaimer.h>
kehellman at yahoo.com               from disclaimer import standard

I used to be schizophrenic, but we're okay now.