The environment regions, including any backing files, are removed. Any log or database files and the environment directory are not removed. The result of attempting to forcibly destroy the environment when it is in use is unspecified.
Processes using an environment often maintain open file descriptors for shared regions within it.
On UNIX systems, the environment removal will usually succeed, and processes that have already joined the region will continue to run in that region without change. However, processes attempting to join the environment will either fail or create new regions. Alternatively, if recovery is not required because no database state is maintained across failures, and no system resources need to be released, it is possible to clean up an environment by simply removing all the Berkeley DB files in the database environment's directories. The shared memory region was in use and the force flag was not set.