Strange pmake behavior

[David Hinds]

Something bad just happened to me, but I can't tell exactly how bad it is.
I was rebuilding a large program after making a minor modification, with
pmake.  When it got to the point of trying to link the executable, I realized
that it was going to fail because the text file was busy - I was running
the previous version of the program in the background.  So, I interrupted
the make with control-C.  Pmake then proceeded to delete the file it was
last trying to make - the busy executable!  This seems to me to be a poor
way of dealing with the signal, to put it mildly.  Now, the job seems to
still be running.  What is going on?  Does the OS still have a link to the
deleted file somewhere?  Will the program crash if the OS has to fetch a
page from the executable at some point?  This is a LONG job - I expect it
to run for two weeks - so I don't want to get a core dump when this is
all over.  Any ideas?

 -David Hinds
  dhinds at cb-iris.stanford.edu