5.5.1 Portability of Classical Functions

Most usual functions can either be missing, or be buggy, or be limited on some architectures. This section tries to make an inventory of these portability issues. By definition, this list will always require additions, please help us keeping it as complete as possible

unlink

The POSIX spec says that unlink causes the given files to be removed only after there are no more open file handles for it. Not all OS's support this behaviour though. So even on systems that provide unlink, you cannot portably assume it is OK to call it on files that are open. For example, on Windows 9x and ME, such a call would fail; on DOS it could even lead to file system corruption, as the file might end up being written to after the OS has removed it.