[asveikau]

Nonetheless the reply prompted me to look into the rename case specifically. Apparently on Linux, the replacement of the destination file is atomic (as many of us already knew and take for granted), but there's no guarantee that you won't see both old and new names in flight for a brief moment in time (like the last sentence of my comment).

Would not be surprised if all bets are off once you get an NFS mount involved.

As always it's a tradeoff between useful behaviors and the cost of synchronizing.