I need some opinions / ideas here. I have a situation where a third party vendor is delivering files via ftp to one of our servers. They do not have the ability to do a 'rename' or any other ftp command outside of 'put'. We need to be able to tell when the file is complete and then move it to a processing directory.

A few methods have been used here before, but I don't really like them. They work fine, I'm just picky I guess.

One method was to watch the size over time. If the file didn't grow for X amount of time then consider it complete and begin processing. This has it's obvious flaws, just one of which being a slow network connection.

The other method was to perform and 'fuser -u' on the file and see if anything came back. Effective, but I prefer not to have to shell out of a perl script if I don't have to(I would like to keep this in perl).

Does anyone have a better way to see if a file is open or currently being written? It is possible to use Proc::ProcessTable, but that would be pretty ineffecient to run every 5 minutes (or sooner).

TIA,
Chad.

In reply to Detecting An Open File by gnu@perl

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