Effect of deleting executables of running programs

[Shriram R <shriram1976@yahoo.com>]

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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