There is no requirement for UNIX to "load the entire file before executing," nor does the deletion of files on disk have anything to do with whether or not a fi

There is no requirement for UNIX to "load the entire file before executing," nor does the deletion of files on disk have anything to do with whether or not a file is executable. Under UNIX, any file which has been opened will be accessible until it is closed, regardless of whether or not the file has been deleted (the number of hard links for the inode drops to zero, in UNIX parlance). For a more technical explanation see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode