Delete is different in the sense that deleting a file is just adding a flag which tells the OS to delete the file once all file handles are closed. However newer versions of Windows 10 use POSIX delete semantics by default on NTFS. This means the file will be deleted immediately.
Is that true? I thought POSIX deletion semantics only happened if FILE_DISPOSITION_POSIX_SEMANTICS is passed to SetFileInformationByHandle function (at FileDispositionInfoEx level), otherwise traditional Windows deletion semantics applied. (If POSIX semantics was the default, that might break legacy apps which were not expecting it – the kind of breaking change that Microsoft is usually careful to avoid.)
Edit: Just tested again. I'm not sure how you create files with FILE_SHARE_DELETE in Python so I used another program to create a file and hold the handle open. I then used `os.remove` to successfully delete the file while the handle was open. I could also delete the file from Windows Explorer. This was on Windows 10 1909 on the machine I use for development, thus it is possible that I've set some experimental option somewhere that affects Windows' behaviour. So further tests are welcome.
I am just surprised that Microsoft would change the default behaviour of DeleteFileW in a Windows 10 build. It seems like the kind of thing that would cause backward compatibility issues. Indeed, I've even found people reporting things breaking due to this [1]. Maybe Microsoft's culture doesn't put the same emphasis on backward compatibility that it used to?
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60424732/did-the-behavio...