Re: Safe to open+close for every write, without locking?

Because you've opened the file for appending, you won't see any data clobbering (i.e. data lost/overwritten) but you will see data overlapping and lines split. i.e. each process will buffer its data into (likely 8k) blocks then append that block to the file. The blocks from different processes may be interleaved. So if a line from one process straddles two blocks, the first half of the line will be written, then possibly 8K of lines and half lines from another process, followed by the remainder of that line.

Dave.

Comment on Re: Safe to open+close for every write, without locking?

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Re^2: Safe to open+close for every write, without locking? by sedusedan (Pilgrim) on Dec 21, 2012 at 16:42 UTC
Can you provide a script to demonstrate that, perhaps?	[reply]
Re^3: Safe to open+close for every write, without locking? by dave_the_m (Monsignor) on Dec 21, 2012 at 22:55 UTC
Here ya go: `#!/usr/bin/perl open my $fh, '>>', '/tmp/out' or die "open: $!\n"; sub output { my ($id) = @_; my $line = sprintf "[%02d: my id is: %02d]\n", $id, $id; # 19 char +s print $fh $line x 500; # bigger than 8K, and $line straddles boun +dary warn "$id: sleeping...\n"; sleep 1; warn "$id: exiting\n"; exit; } for (1..3) { sleep 1; warn "$_: spawning...\n"; my $pid = fork(); die "fork failed: $!\n" unless defined $pid; next if $pid; # child output($_); } sleep 5; __END__` [download] And here's the output: `$ rm -f /tmp/out $ perl5160 /tmp/p1 1: spawning... 1: sleeping... 2: spawning... 1: exiting 2: sleeping... 3: spawning... 3: sleeping... 2: exiting 3: exiting $ grep -v '^\[..: my id is: ..]$' /tmp/out [02[03: my id is: 03] : my id is: 03] $` [download] Dave.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Safe to open+close for every write, without locking? by sedusedan (Pilgrim) on Dec 22, 2012 at 01:48 UTC
Hi Dave, Thanks for writing the script. I added a `seek($fh, 0, 2)` before `print $fh ...` and it still manages to overlap. So, flock() it is.	[reply] [d/l] [select]