> Thanks for your replies, they are helpful. I should have included in > my initial question that I don't have as much control over the program > that writes (pgm-W) as I'd like. Otherwise, the write to a different > filename and then rename solution would work great. There's no way to > tell from the os.stat() methods to tell when the file is finished > being copied? I ran some test programs, one of which continously > copies big files from one directory to another, and another that > continously does a glob.glob("*.pdf") on those files and looks at the > st_atime and st_mtime parts of the return value of os.stat(filename). > From that experiment it looks like st_atime and st_mtime equal each > other until the file has finished being copied. Nothing in the > documentation about st_atime or st_mtime leads me to think this is > true, it's just my observations about the two test programs I've > described. > > Any thoughts? Thanks! > Doug
Could you maybe us the os module to call out to lsof to see if anyone still has the target file open? I am assuming that when the write process finishes writing it would close the file. Check "man lsof" -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list