Do they indicate that you reading information from the file; manipulating it and then re-writing it in place with new values?

The user is supposed to convert the binary data into a JSON-representation (either as a file or in memory), modify it as required and then convert JSON back into the binary format.

And this "modifying the file during a parse / write is guaranteed to lead to inconsistency" indicates that there may be multiple concurrent accessors?

I'm reading a file. It's always possible someone is doing something stupif(1) and modifying / replacing the file while the tool is parsing it. A big fat "DON'T DO THAT" sticker is probably sufficient, but it would be nice to limit the exposure. Another way could be to calculate the file size / date / md5sum before and after parsing and repeat the parse if it changed unexpectedly.

(1) Nice typo.

P.S.: I already talked about the data format in a previous node

In reply to Re^2: Deciding for a file access method - requesting opinions by Monk::Thomas
in thread Deciding for a file access method - requesting opinions by Monk::Thomas

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