AIX moans: "Cannot open or remove a file containing a running program"

• http://www.linuxmisc.com/11-unix-aix/994cba5a5792b68b.htm

I came across this phenomenon in various contexts on AIX. 

It really sounds like "text file busy" from the old Unix days.

Looks like the guys who misuse this error message for there miserable situations actually mean "cannot open or remove a file". I call this capturing.

Looks like some variants of the "copy" utility (like CPAN File::Copy) use this error message instead of "no such file or directory". Maybe this happens in concurrent environments / situations, where a file disappears between the call to File::Copy and the actual kernel "open". Once "open" has a file handle, the inode access counter gets incremented, and the file cannot really disappear any longer, as long as it remains open ie. did not get closed again.

To be continue …