Effect of deleting executables of running programs

From: Shriram R
Date: Wed Aug 18 2004 - 13:17:49 EST


Hi,

Newbie here. I am not sure if I am sending this email
to the right list. My apologies if I am not and I
would be happy if someone can point me to the right
mailing list.

We have a 24 node/48 processor cluster in our lab with
the following specs.

AMD Athlon
Redhat 7.3
Kernel version - 2.4.19

I had around 10 jobs that had been running on the
cluster for about 15 or so days. These were
using a common executable "abcd.out" (compiled in
fortran 90). After they had been running for
about 15 days, I made the mistake of deleting
abcd.out. Immediately about
3 or 4 of my jobs crashed with a "bus error". But,
some 6-7 of my jobs
continued running. I had 2 questions with regards to
this :

a) I always thought that once a job is running, the
executable is
entirely loaded into memory and the abcd.out file
is no longer needed.
If so, then why does the a running job crash on
deleting abcd.out ?

b) To what extent can I trust that the rest of the 6-7
jobs that are
running have not been affected by this deletion of
"abcd.out" ?

Thanks in advance,
shriram.




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