title: Deleting a file with I/O in progress: Is it a filesystem and/or an OS feature?
body: <p>I'm writing a shell script that will run on Linux but can operate on files sitting on a mounted partition,</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>that may or may not have an ext* file-system. It could eg be NTFS, FAT32, or any inode- or non-inode-based system;</p></li>
  <li><p>that could get further re-mounted on other boxes running non-Linux OSes like Windows or Mac.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Further, my script needs to be able to delete a file on this shared, arbitrarily formatted partition (even while the file's being read from or written to) by a remote process running on Linux, Windows, or Mac boxes</p>
  
  <p><strong>Questions:</strong></p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Is the ability to be able to delete a file in use a feature of,</p>
  
  <p>a. only the file-system?</p>
  
  <p>b. or, only the OS?</p>
  
  <p>c. or, a combo of both? </p></li>
  <li><p><em>(Extension of Q1)</em> Does it matter if the processe doing I/O on the file and the one deleting the file are both local or remote?</p></li>
  </ol>