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[Python] RE: How to safely maintain a status file

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Fri Jul 13 14:19:24 EDT 2012 
On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 3:59 AM, Prasad, Ramit
<ramit.prasad at jpmorgan.com> wrote:
> I lean slightly towards the POSIX handling with the addition that
> any additional write should throw an error. You are now saving to
> a file that will not exist the moment you close it and that is probably
> not expected.

There are several different possible "right behaviors" here, but they
depend more on the application than anything else. With a log file,
for instance, the act of deleting it is more a matter of truncating it
(dispose of the old history), so the right thing to do is to start a
fresh file. Solution: Close the file and re-open it periodically. But
I don't know of an efficient way to do that with Windows semantics.
Renaming/moving an open file in order to perform log rotation isn't
all that easy.

ChrisA
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