[ale] inode change after vi a file ?

[kaboom at oobleck.net (Chris Ricker)]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Jerry Yu wrote:

> To my surprise, the inode #  changes as long as I do ":w" inside vi.  This
> holds true on a stock installation of CentOS 4.1 and CentOS 4.3 (equivalent
> of RHEL 4.* AS) . Anyone knows this is a new feature? If it is a feature,
> I'd like to learn ways to turn it off.
> 
> [zyu at saturn ~]$ date > blah; ls -i blah; vi blah; ls -i blah
> 688427 blah
> 692394 blah

It's making a new temporary file that you're editing, then moving it over 
the original file....

later,
chris