Re: mv not safe - deletes moved file too soon

[Philip Rowlands]

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Ryan Duffy wrote:

>a large file to move (e.g. 700Meg ISO image).
>large amounts of RAM available for file caching.
>2 separate disks of significantly different speed (e.g. one fast
>internal HDD, one fairly slow external HDD).

I'm going to make some assumptions here. Please correct them if wrong:
- You have some USB or FireWire drive connected (to Linux?)
- You have moved a file onto it, and noticed that mv returns well before
the kernel buffers are flushed to disk
- You have mounted the filesystems (probably implicitly) with the
"async" mount option

This has nothing to do with GNU mv, and everything to do with the kernel
I/O caching and mount options. There are options (e.g. "sync") to mount
to trade off performance against data integrity, if that's your
preference.


Cheers,
Phil