[ale] inode change after vi a file ?

[Joe Steele]

Jerry Yu wrote:
> without agressive inode recycling, one'd run out of inodes at some 
> point too ...
> it may be a feature for VIM, can it be turned off  by some magic 
> switch?  I see it as a bug personally. wonder whether/how oowriter and 
> nano do reliable atomic writes. also wonder how vi on Solaris does it.
>
This feature is controlled by the 'backupcopy' or 'bkc' setting.  I 
suspect your present setting is "auto", so vim tries to rename the 
original file to a backup name, write the data to a new file, then 
unlink the original file.  What you are asking for is obtained with the 
"yes" setting:

    :set bkc=yes

For more details, see ":help backupcopy" in vim. 

--Joe