From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Raymond Jennings Subject: Question about dirty data for unlinked files Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2017 13:07:23 -0700 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 To: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org Return-path: Received: from mail-qt0-f173.google.com ([209.85.216.173]:36019 "EHLO mail-qt0-f173.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751106AbdCWUIK (ORCPT ); Thu, 23 Mar 2017 16:08:10 -0400 Received: by mail-qt0-f173.google.com with SMTP id r45so185267277qte.3 for ; Thu, 23 Mar 2017 13:08:09 -0700 (PDT) Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: If you delete a file (and don't have it open), and there's a bunch of dirty data for that file still in page cache, does all that dirty data disappear or does it still get written back? I'm curious for performance reasons because I have an experimental process I'm developing, and it has a habit of leaving large amounts of dirty data in a huge output file. I'd like to be able to unlink the file and skip the writeback process once the file's been unlinked.