G'day jszinger,

I had considered something along the lines you suggest (with multiple processes) but decided it was too hit-and-miss for my liking. Looking at the situation where one process changes read permissions, it is more likely this will happen before -r fails or after open succeeds, than in the very tiny window between -r and open.

Please see my response to ++Fletch's post regarding my reasons for wanting specific parameter checks and reporting. The solution he suggests is along the same lines as yours: at the moment, that's the most likely course of action that I'll follow.

I'm doing file checks on both the directory and file parameters so, yes, race conditions are possible there.