in reply to Flock, Seek & WinNT

If your problem is that you need to prevent multiple scripts from altering the same part of the file at the same time, then no, the general case is not built-in to any OS that I know of. The Be OS will automatically lock the area of a read so you can do read/modify/write on an area easily, but there is no way to handle the general case and you didn't give details.