Detecting if a file is busy

der Mouse mouse at thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu
Mon Jul 1 12:33:07 AEST 1991


In article <3300 at dsacg3.dsac.dla.mil>, nto0302 at dsacg3.dsac.dla.mil (Bob Fisher) writes:

> How can one process tell if a file is open in another process?

One can't really.

> I'm writing a daemon that takes files placed into an input directory
> but the daemon needs to wait until the file is closed by the process
> that is creating it.

The creating process will have to cooperate somehow.  There is no
portable way to determine this otherwise; about all you can do is
grovel through kernel data structures, and even then you can't always
get it right (suppose another machine has it mounted via NFS and a
process there is writing it).

					der Mouse

			old: mcgill-vision!mouse
			new: mouse at larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu



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