I was unaware of the first part of this, and decided to find a reference. This stack overflow answer[0] provides some detail on ETXTBUSY and the fact that writ

I was unaware of the first part of this, and decided to find a reference. This stack overflow answer[0] provides some detail on ETXTBUSY and the fact that writing directly writing to a running executable file will fail. (I had thought it would unlink the file like in the second case, simply because that's what I always see when recompiling something that's already running. This obviously uses the second method though). [0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/187931/modifying-binary-during-execution https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/187931/modifying-bi...