Does the on-disk image of an executable ever change?

[Ben Scott]

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 10:58 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
<rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> I'm not really *that*
> intimately familiar with all of the details of how RPM supersedes
> files during upgrade (does it overwrite them in-place, or does it
> rename() over them?) ...

  RPM always creates new files with a temporary name (it appends some
kind of ID to the regular name).  Once all files in the package are
present, it renames the new files to their final names.  This takes
advantage of the standard Unix promise that rename(2) can overwrite
and will be atomic.

-- Ben