idk what it even means to "have disk space"
That's an insightful meta-question because it underlies your subject question.
To understand what it means to "unlink" a file, it helps to understand what it means to "link" a file, and what "a file" is. Believe it or not, "a file" is, like the three blind men and an elephant, different things to different people.
The answer depends on the filesystem. On Windows you probably used NTFS; on Linux you might use ext3. I'll restrict my answer to the Linux side, and further to filesystems (like ext3) that use inodes to describe files, which most native ones do.
These filesytems organize the raw disk space in terms of blocks. Scattered among the blocks are some that contain inodes. Each inode holds information about one file: ownership, permissions, and the location & size of the data it's using.
The filesystem is full of inodes just lying around waiting to be used. In the old days, the number of inodes was fixed when the filesystem was created, and if you ran out of inodes you "ran out of space" because you couldn't create new files. Nowadays that's usually handled dynamically.
The filesystem keeps track of where all the inodes are, which ones are in use, and which blocks remain unassigned. To "have disk space" is to have blocks that are not allocated to any inode.
When you create a new file, you actually do two things:
- grab an inode from the unused ones
- assign it a name
The first step can't be done separately. You can't manipulate the inode directly. The operating system doesn't have functions to do that. We create and open files by name; the details the inode stay in the kernel.
The second step can be repeated with ln(1): you can assign as many names to an inode as you like. We call that step "linking" because you link a name to the file. You reverse the process by removing the link with rm(1). There's even another name for it: unlink(1). And now you know why it's called "rm" and not "del": we're removing a link, not deleting a file.
When is a file deleted, then? What's the opposite of creating a file?
- remove the link of the inode to its name
- relinquish the inode
Removing the link is carried out first. Before the inode is then put on the unused pile, though, two restrictions must be satisfied:
- Because an inode many have more than one name, it stays in use until no names are linked to it. That's what meant by when links fall to zero in some documentation you might come across.
- Because an inode may be open — a program is using it — the OS won't won't put the the inode in the unused pile until no file descriptors reference it (when no program has the file open).
Once an inode has no name linked to it, it's only a matter of time before it's relinquished. Because an inode can be referred to only by a name linked to it, it's impossible to create a new link or open a file without a name. Any attempt to open a file with the same name will just result in a new file: allocate a different inode, and link the name to it.
Many people find this behavior confusing when they first encounter it, and frustrating when they can't free disk space by "deleting a big file" that's in use by a running process. It makes more sense if you try to imagine what it would happen to a program if a file it was using suddenly disappeared. Or if you've ever experienced the inscrutable Windows error, "the file cannot be deleted because it is open in another program". With inodes, you never get that message because no file is ever deleted while it's open in another program.
