Re: how to write to a file without race condition

From: James (jas_at_spamcop.net)
Date: 07/18/04

  • Next message: James: "Re: how to write to a file without race condition" 
    Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 11:44:21 +0100

    On 17 Jul 2004 23:08:30 GMT, Casper H.S. Dik <Casper.Dik@Sun.COM>
    wrote:

    >James <jas@spamcop.net> writes:
    >
    >>No, each of them will atomically seek to the current EOF, append their
    >>data, then the next one will write at the new EOF. They won't
    >>overwrite each other unless they're running over NFS (which introduces
    >>a race condition) or they used lseek with an explicit offset rather
    >>than SEEK_END.
    >
    >Why do you believe that lseek(..., SEEK_END) has this magic
    >property?

    That's what Alex Colvin said earlier in the thread. It *doesn't* have
    this property (which is hardly "magic", since it amounts to setting
    the O_APPEND flag!), but until I checked for myself his explanation
    seemed reasonable, particularly in the absence of any challenge until
    yours. (James Antill *agreed* with it, then changed his mind
    mid-post...)

    > lseek sets the file pointer and the only thing "SEEK_END"
    >does is to set the file pointer relative to the current end.

    Correct. As I said earlier, to achieve the result described you need
    to set O_APPEND rather than using lseek().

    James.

  • Next message: James: "Re: how to write to a file without race condition"

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