How to determine if a file is in use
Patrick O'Callaghan
pocallaghan at gmail.com
Tue Nov 3 21:45:49 UTC 2009
On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 13:31 -0800, Donald Russell wrote:
> Another system uses FTP to drop files in a directory for me to
> process.
> I have a bash script to process the incoming files. The script is
> started by cron periodically.
>
> There's a problem if the FTP transfer is still in progress because the
> process begins reading the file even though it isn't complete yet.
>
> From a bash script, is there a way to tell if the file is still being
> written to?
> I was looking at the lsof command, which will tell me if the file is
> opened or not, so that's a possibility... but it sure seems awkward
> for the task.
Not really. Since you know that the ftp demon is the only potential
writer for the file, you can use
lsof -p <demon-pid> | grep <filename>
> I could also configure the ftp server to lock files being written, but
> that seems to be discouraged. (based on man vsftpd.conf)
inotify(7) could do the job, but would require some programming.
poc
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