The Life of a Sysadmin

Carousel is a lie!

NFS dotfiles
Fri Feb 5 10:40:12 PST 2010

Reminder to myself: Got a file called .nfs.*? Here's what's going on:

# These files are created by NFS clients when an open file is
# removed. To preserve some semblance of Unix semantics the client
# renames the file to a unique name so that the file appears to have
# been removed from the directory, but is still usable by the process
# that has the file open.

That quote is from /usr/lib/fs/nfs/nfsfind, a shell script on Solaris 10 that's run once a week from root's crontab. Some references:

Tags: networking, opensolaris, solaris, toptip, unix.