I'm always daunted by the prospect of trying to implement file locking. This just came up again in SpamBayes where we have never protected our pickle files from corruption when multiple processes access them simultaneously. The presence of networked file systems and platform-independent locks make it a nasty little problem. Maybe I'm just showing my age. Does fcntl.flock work over NFS and SMB and on Windows? If this is still as much of a mess as I remember, should Python provide a simple file locking module in the standard distribution?
Side note: While reading the fcntl man page on my Mac I came across this text in the description of F_GETLK/F_SETLK/F_SETLKW. This interface follows the completely stupid semantics of System V and IEEE Std 1003.1-1988 (``POSIX.1'') that require that all locks associated with a file for a given process are removed when any file descriptor for that file is closed by that process.... Flock(2) is recommended for applications that want to ensure the integrity of their locks when using library routines or wish to pass locks to their children. I guess the BSD folks were a bit upset when they wrote that. Skip _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com