/etc/hosts busy??

[Hal Murray]

When I tried to update /etc/hosts, it says busy.  I thought I'd been doing 
this for years, so I'm a bit surprised and/or confused.

bash-4.2# mv hosts /etc/hosts
mv: inter-device move failed: 'hosts' to '/etc/hosts'; unable to remove 
target: Device or resource busy
bash-4.2# rm /etc/hosts
rm: cannot remove '/etc/hosts': Device or resource busy
bash-4.2# mv /etc/hosts /etc/hostsx
mv: cannot move '/etc/hosts' to '/etc/hostsx': Device or resource busy
bash-4.2#

It used to work.  I did it sometime after early June.

bash-4.2# ls -l /etc/hosts
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1504 Jun  4 22:07 /etc/hosts
bash-4.2# 

My usual approach for things like this is to find the program that has the 
file open, but I can't find it with lsof.  ??

bash-4.2# lsof | wc
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfsd-fuse file system /run/user/1000/gvfs
      Output information may be incomplete.
   4658   44081  503329
bash-4.2# lsof | grep hosts
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfsd-fuse file system /run/user/1000/gvfs
      Output information may be incomplete.
bash-4.2# 

Does anybody know if something is hiding in that error message and/or how to 
find out what's going on?

cp -p worked, but I'm still curious.  I'm pretty sure I used mv last time, 
but maybe it's been busy for ages.




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