Confused about a file with no links

[Ed Falk]

In article <9952 at brazos.Rice.edu> jes at mbio.med.upenn.edu (Joe Smith) writes:

>As the 'NLK' field is supposed to be the number of links to the file (and
>NLK agrees with ls for other files which I could find directory entries
>for) I am curious as to what a file with no links is and what conditions
>create them.

Well, you could delete a file that some program has open.  It doesn't go
away until it's closed, but it has no links.  I suppose that could be it.

Many programs that create temporary files delete them right away so the
file will go away as soon as the program exits.  The advantage to this is
that if the program exits abnormally, it won't leave its temporary file
lying around.

	-ed falk, sun microsystems -- sun!falk, falk at sun.com