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My question was closed as off-topic. My (low-confidence) understanding of the edit history suggests that three separate individuals all agreed that it was off-topic and so this doesn't seem to just be a single reviewer misunderstanding the question.

It does seem that many readers find the question to be poor in some way - obviously I don't currently think it's a stupid question (you can see discussion of the question's stupidity or otherwise in the notes), but I think that's irrelevant - even if it's a poor question it seems on-topic to me.

The on-topic page for Stack Overflow says questions should cover:

[1] a specific programming problem, or

[2] a software algorithm, or

[3] software tools commonly used by programmers; and is a practical, answerable problem that is unique to software development

[Numbering added by me]

I believe my original question matches 3 (software tools = Unix, answerable problem = I don't understand some ordering guarantees, with a yes/no question). After it was closed, I edited it to try and make it match 1 too, but to be honest I think that was a bit silly as the problem was already quite clearly implied by the question.

Any idea what perspective I'm missing here? Is there a way I could have better phrased this question or is this just a bad topic for some reason?

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  • Can you address the "unique to software development" requirement? (Which, for a reason I don't understand you appear to have lumped in with [3] rather than as [4] where it belongs.) In any case, the question now closed as "need[ing] details or clarity", rather than being "hopelessly" off-topic. Commented Oct 20, 2024 at 15:48
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    I've reopened the question and re-closed it as "needs details or clarity (unclear)". I've also left a couple of comments stating what additional information I believe the question requires. Commented Oct 20, 2024 at 15:55
  • Thanks Makyen, that's much more helpful than "off topic" :) Not sure how to best "resolve" this question now, but the problem I wanted to discuss here is now solved! (as for the original question, I'll get back to that when I have more time). Commented Oct 20, 2024 at 17:54
  • (BTW - "Which, for a reason I don't understand you appear to have lumped in with [3] rather than as [4] where it belongs" - that was just because it's an "and". I should have labeled those parts 3a and 3b. As for why it's unique to software development... not sure, is there any other context than software development where you need to know the relationship between these operations?). Commented Oct 20, 2024 at 17:55
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    It's all moot now, but the reason I asked about [4] is because the on-topic logic is "(1 or 2 or 3) and (4)" not "1 or 2 or (3a and 3b)". I'm not saying you're wrong (and I wouldnt vote to close for that reason) to think it meets 4/3b, but you took care to address part, but not all, of that final criterion. Still, like I say, it's moot now the close reason has been corrected. Commented Oct 20, 2024 at 18:05
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    A question can be out of scope and not be “stupid”. Commented Oct 20, 2024 at 18:11
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    "Not sure how to best "resolve" this question now". You can delete it if you want to. The question will be deleted automatically anyway if it remains closed with no answers. So there's no need to "resolve" it. OTOH ... if you still want an answer, you should EDIT the question to address Mayken's concerns. (And Karl's) Basically, the question is not answerable in its current form. Commented Oct 21, 2024 at 3:11

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The on-topic page for StackOverflow says questions should cover:

You seem to have mis-parsed this.

A question needs to cover at least one of:

  1. a specific programming problem, or

  2. a software algorithm, or

  3. software tools commonly used by programmers

and it must also

  • [be about] a practical, answerable problem that is unique to software development.

(Also, where it says "commonly", it should really say "specifically". After all, programmers "commonly" use word processors, web browsers, image editors etc. because they are also just ordinary computer users a lot of the time.)

That said, I think your question qualifies as on topic. We would not generally consider Unix a "software tool commonly used by programmers", because there are plenty of uses of Unix that have nothing to do with programming. Every computer has an operating system, but only a minority of computer users are programmers (citation needed). However, your question is about "a specific programming problem" because you intend to use Unix system calls, presumably via a programming language - not the command line (there's an unlink shell command in coreutils, but not wait.) This is "unique to software development" in that accessing these system calls more or less requires writing code; and the question is practical (you seem to be worried about a possible race condition) and presumably answerable (as you say, fundamentally this should be a yes-or-no question, and the answer could be backed up with references to a specification).

I think the question is clear enough as is, personally, but adding a simple C implementation of the processes you describe might still be preferable. It might also be the case (this is definitely not my area of expertise) that the answer is different for threads vs. processes, for example. Code that shows the use of fork or whatever else, in combination with the unlink and wait calls you have in mind, unambiguously describes the situation. And if I did understand correctly that you're concerned about a race condition, it would probably be a good idea to have the literal phrase "race condition" somewhere in the question body.

Finally: we aren't really interested in your motivation for asking the question - that only causes a lack of focus. If you want to ask a question about what your code is doing, we need a MRE, and we need a question that is specifically about what the MRE is doing. If you want to know abstractly how something works, so that you can apply it somewhere else, then just ask, and do the application privately.

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