Sybren Stuvel wrote: > Elmo Mäntynen enlightened us with: > > Only locally. I want to be able to read/write to a single file from > > multiple possibly parallel processes. Would 'touch lock' (or > > something like that) work reliably (this just occured to me)? > > I use a lock directory for that, os.mkdir('/var/lock/somedir'). > If you use a file, you need two steps: > 1) Check whether the lock-file exists > 2) Create the lock-file > > This is not atomic. With a directory, creating it will fail if it > already exists. This means you can atomically check for the lock, and > if it doesn't exist already, you've immediately created it too.
`Pathutils <http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/pathutils.html>`_ has a simple interface to a system like this. Apparently not all platforms guarantee that attempts to create a directory will fail if the directory already exists - so pathutils does *slightly* more, but it's the same idea. All the best, Fuzzyman http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/index.shtml > > Sybren > -- > The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a > capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the > safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself? > Frank Zappa -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list