citycrew:

Can you simply rename it so the mailer can start a new one, and let you process the other one without worrying about locking or hurrying? I don't whack EMail in perl, so there may be some shortcomings to this approach that I haven't thought of.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

Hi Roboticus,

My fear with doing that was that if mail was being written to the spool file when I try to rename it, it will lose that email. If, however, mv recognizes a locked file then I am golden. Would you happen to know if it does?

citycrew:

Sorry, I don't know that. If it's a unix box, though, renaming it won't affect the processes that have it open. So you could potentially rename it and wait a while (giving other jobs a chance to finish using it) and *then* process it. Hopefully someone a bit more knowledgeable about the Unix filesystem will chime in. I'm even less knowledgeable about windows filesystems (except for FAT12/16, yech!)...

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

This sequence seems to work for me:

open my $fh, '+<', $theFile or die $!;
my $stuff = do{ local $/; <$fh> };
truncate $fh, 0;
close $fh;
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use autodie;
use Fcntl ':flock', ':seek';
open my $fh, "+<", "mail";
flock $fh, LOCK_EX;
my $text = do {local $/; <$fh>};
seek $fh, SEEK_SET, 0;   # Only needed if you're going to write.
truncate $fh, 0;
close $fh;
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POSITION and WHENCE reversed - it ought to be: seek $fh, 0, SEEK_SET;

You could take a look at File::Slurp's edit_file sub. This allows you to edit file contents. You could push the contents from $_ to another variable and then clear $_. I'm not sure how locks are done internally though.

use File::Slurp qw(edit_file);

my $contents = '';
edit_file { $contents = $_; $_ = '';} 'temp/test.txt';
print $contents;
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Thanks guys, I'll check out the truncate code and see if it works for me