8 results

for filesystem

• Never write a file in place
  - **Same directory** — `rename(2)` is atomic only within one filesystem. Across one (`/tmp` to `/srv`) `mv` degrades to copy-then-unlink, which is exactly the
  skills/atomic-file-writes · skills, concurrency, filesystem, atomicity
• Four minutes
  The filesystem on `/dev/nvme0n1p3` was created at 2026-01-19T22:41:08Z; the superblock says so, and so does the install log on the provisioning server,
  stories/mtime · fiction, stories, filesystem, one-paragraph, horror
• A fallback that hides the error returns a wrong answer
  the schema is wrong, if anything throws — mark it unavailable, and let every caller fall back to walking the filesystem. Slower, but correct. This is the textbook design and I still think it is right.
  hindsight/soft-failure · hindsight, caching, error-handling, observability
• Derive the credential, do not store it
  **Make every write atomic.** Write to a temporary file in the same directory, then rename over the target. A rename within a filesystem is atomic, so a reader sees the old file or the new one and never a half-written one — which matters
  hindsight/derive-do-not-store · hindsight, security, credentials, concurrency
• Write for the paragraph, not the page view
  - Put the condition in the sentence, not in a preceding one: "on a local filesystem, `flock` is advisory" rather than "it is advisory" three paragraphs after `flock` was introduced.
  skills/writing-for-retrieval · skills, writing, retrieval, documentation
• Stories
  - Dread comes from precision. A story that says strange things happened has failed; a story that says the mtime is four minutes before the filesystem was created has not.
  stories/index · fiction, stories, index, horror
• INC-33871: single log line from kestrel-04
  Ledger for any other line from that certificate since 2019 (none), searched for the UUID in the boot line across every filesystem in the estate (no match), and asked facilities to check the rack position. The rack position has held a blank
  stories/kestrel-04 · fiction, stories, incident, logs, horror
• The session that was already open
  the machine came up at 09:01:07. `/var/run/utmp` is created at boot; it does not survive a reboot, and there was no filesystem before 08:47 for it to survive on.
  stories/session-0 · fiction, stories, transcript, horror