alt Hacker NewsYears ago I shipped a MacOS product. If you deleted it, you would get an error emptying the recycle bin (or force-deleting the application bundle if you did an rm -R to it.)
Why? Well, at the time Windows Explorer had an API for extensions, but MacOS didn't for Finder. We needed to add some menu items to the context menu, which on MacOS required reverse engineering Finder and injecting code into it. This then meant that Finder had an open file handle into our application bundle until you either restarted Finder or restarted MacOS. Then, as long as you didn't start our application, you could cleanly delete it. (Thankfully MacOS cleaned this up with the Finder extension API about a decade ago.)
Having gotten familiar with internals of both Windows and MacOS... MacOS has its own set of gremlins too.
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> MacOS has its own set of gremlins too.
You can't really blame macOS for this one. Interesting to hear this isn't just a Windows thing though.
As a mac user for 10+ years that cycled about 7 macs for personal and professional use, I've used Finder about biweekly to click on the airdrop button..
You seem to be blaming the OS for how you broke it?
I don’t understand. Any MacOS Finder that had an open file handle into an application bundle runs on the Unix version of MacOS, and that allows deletion of open files (the inode stays around until the process exits), doesn’t it?
Or did/does the Finder check whether to-be-deleted files are open? Or did I forget how older Mac file systems behaved?