Issue #1494 has been updated by Niels Ganser. In fact, back in 2004, only seconds after posting his patch, Florian already "came to the conclusion that this patch sucks": http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/vframe.rb/ruby/ruby-core/2849?2697-2915+split-mode-vertical Matz chimed in shortly thereafter and consensus seemed to be to simply rescue (and discard) EACCESS as the file will be garbage collected after unlinking anyways: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/vframe.rb/ruby/ruby-core/2850?2697-2915+split-mode-vertical As Eric noted above, the current implementation goes contrary to what many UNIX programmers have learned for years. ---------------------------------------- http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/1494 ---------------------------------------- http://redmine.ruby-lang.org