I will be writing some code that will be writing some large files. While these files are being written, I’d like to prevent other threads and/or applications from accessing the files. How can I lock the files to achieve this? Changing file permissions isn’t going to do the job, because one process/thread needs write access, while all others shouldn’t be allowed access at all.
How are you writing the files? If you are using the Cocoa method writeToFile:atomically:, just pass YES for atomically. This will write the data to a unique temp file first, then just move the temp file to its final destination. If you are not using Cocoa…well, I’ve seen other programs do this, but I’m not exactly sure how. –JediKnil
When it writes the file atomically (say using the NSData class), where is it actually writing the file? I don’t see the file until it’s actually complete (which is good).
I haven’t researched this so I can only guess, but I would say that it writes it somewhere in /tmp, or to a dot file in the same directory as the target, neither of which would normally be seen if you’re just looking casually.
You have actually stumbled across one of the cool things about OS X. When you tell an NS Object to write it’s self automatically it doesn’t write the file right away. But rather it writes it to a temp file and then renames the file when the write is finished. This is intended to stop corruption of the file system in case of a crash. In some special cases it is undesirable for this to happen, thankfully the gave us the option not do this. Original submitter, have you looked into using a combination of fopen, and lockf. I know they are pure C, but they may get what you want done. – CurtisHoover