[tfigment]

this has led to some interesting observations for me in linux when I've had really large log files that were still in use and were "deleted" but the file was still in use. (I think cat /dev/nul > file will do this). Tools like du now cannot find where the disk usage actually is. Only on restart of the app does usage show correctly again. Kinda hard to troubleshoot if you were not aware this was what happened.

[asveikau]

I agree that this is a drawback or a common gotcha for the Unix behavior which would be more user visible with the NT behavior, but to anyone advocating the Windows way I would ask: is it worth getting this fringe detail "right" by making every unlink(x); open(x, O_CREAT ...); into a risky behavior that may randomly fail depending on what another process is doing to x? On Windows, I have seen this type of pattern, a common one because most people aren't aware of this corner case, be the cause of seemingly random failures that would be rather inexplicable to most programmers. (Often the program holding x open is an AV product scanning it for viruses, meaning that any given user system might have a flurry of race condition causing filesystem activities that may or may not conflict with your process.)