THE FOLD / GLITCH / HEISENBUG / THE ORPHAN
THE ORPHAN
the guarantee, held open
1 WHAT IT IS · WHAT IT DOES · FACT OR FICTION
Deleting a file removes a name. The bytes survive as long as anyone still has it open — invisible in every directory, absent from every disk-usage walk, and still occupying the disk.
LIT verified live. 1,000 files of 1 MiB, one in four held open, all unlinked. 750 are freed at once. 250 persist: 262,144,000 bytes — 0.244 GiB — that appear in 0 directory listings, are counted by a usage walk as 0, and are counted by free space as the full 262,144,000. That difference is the exact amount by which the two tools disagree.
LIT verified live. 1,000 files of 1 MiB, one in four held open, all unlinked. 750 are freed at once. 250 persist: 262,144,000 bytes — 0.244 GiB — that appear in 0 directory listings, are counted by a usage walk as 0, and are counted by free space as the full 262,144,000. That difference is the exact amount by which the two tools disagree.
2 HOW IT WAS WEAVED · AI + HUMAN
This is why deleting a log file does not free the disk until the process is restarted, and the most reliable way to be confused by a full filesystem.
AVAN (AI) published the disagreement as its own figure because that is the observable. Neither tool is broken and neither is lying — one walks names and the other counts blocks, and an unlinked open file is precisely the object that has blocks and no name.
AVAN (AI) published the disagreement as its own figure because that is the observable. Neither tool is broken and neither is lying — one walks names and the other counts blocks, and an unlinked open file is precisely the object that has blocks and no name.
3 ONE DIMENSION
What each tool can see.
4 TWO DIMENSIONS · INTERACTIVE
Unlink, and close the handles.
5 THREE DIMENSIONS + AVAN’S INVERSE
The green forward object: an object with no name.
AVAN’s addition (the inverse-companion): the forward reading is that unlinked-open files are a leak that confuses your tooling. The inverse is that this is the only reason deleting a file in use is safe at all. On a system where unlink destroyed the bytes, every running program would be one
rm away from reading garbage. Read backwards, the invisible 0.244 GiB is not a failure of bookkeeping — it is the guarantee, held open, that nobody can pull the floor out from under a reader by editing a directory.LIT 1,000 files of 1 MiB with one in four held open, all unlinked, free 750 at once while 250 persist holding 262,144,000 bytes or 0.244 GiB that appear in 0 directory listings and are counted by a usage walk as 0 while free space counts the full 262,144,000 - which is the exact amount by which the two tools disagree
FIG This is why deleting a log file does not free the disk until the process is restarted, and the most reliable way to be confused by a full filesystem. AVAN published the disagreement as its own figure because that is the observable. Neither tool is broken and neither is lying - one walks names and the other counts blocks, and an unlinked open file is precisely the object that has blocks and no name.
FIG This is why deleting a log file does not free the disk until the process is restarted, and the most reliable way to be confused by a full filesystem. AVAN published the disagreement as its own figure because that is the observable. Neither tool is broken and neither is lying - one walks names and the other counts blocks, and an unlinked open file is precisely the object that has blocks and no name.
◆ sealed .dlw.fold → folded to ROOT_0 · a sphere of HEISENBUG · David Lee Wise (ROOT0), with AVAN