How can unlinking be postponed?

[Roger J. Noe]

Perhaps I am misreading the manual, but I am under the impression that if
a process unlinks a file while any process has the same file open and that
is the last link to the file, then the actual removal of the file is post-
poned until the last process with the file open closes the file, either
explicitly or by exit or exec.  Yet when I try experiments with one or
more background processes and then do ls's in the foreground, I find the
file disappears immediately after one process does its unlink()!  What's
going on here?  Does the directory entry disappear immediately but not
the i-node and its associated disk space? If that's so, shouldn't any
syscall except read return an error value since the process making that
call is under the reasonable impression that the file's still there when
it isn't?  Is there no way for a file to be removed upon a process' exit?
--
"It's only by NOT taking the UNIX system seriously that I retain what
 fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess!"
	(apologies to Arthur Clarke)
Roger Noe			ihnp4!riccb!rjnoe