What is the best way to open a file for exclusive access in Python?

by

I don’t think there is a fully crossplatform way. On unix, the fcntl module will do this for you. However on windows (which I assume you are by the paths), you’ll need to use the win32file module.

Fortunately, there is a portable implementation (portalocker) using the platform appropriate method at the python cookbook.

To use it, open the file, and then call:

portalocker.lock(file, flags)

where flags are portalocker.LOCK_EX for exclusive write access, or LOCK_SH for shared, read access.

More Related Contents:

  1. Turn the whole file uppercase
  2. How do you append to a file?
  3. Is explicitly closing files important?
  4. Iterating on a file doesn’t work the second time
  5. Directory-tree listing in Python
  6. How to write to a CSV line by line?
  7. Open file in a relative location in Python
  8. check what files are open in Python
  9. How to convert a file to utf-8 in Python?
  10. replacing text in a file with Python
  11. How do I append to a file?
  12. How do I call a function from another .py file?
  13. Most efficient way to search the last X lines of a file?
  14. How to save a list to a file and read it as a list type?
  15. os.walk without digging into directories below
  16. Reading files in a particular order in python
  17. Check if object is file-like in Python
  18. Python Random Access File
  19. How to read one single line of csv data in Python?
  20. Best method for reading newline delimited files and discarding the newlines?
  21. How to safely write to a file?
  22. What is the idiomatic way to iterate over a binary file?
  23. Read from File, or STDIN
  24. Detect duplicate MP3 files with different bitrates and/or different ID3 tags?
  25. Error with double backslash in Windows path in Python [duplicate]
  26. Sending a file over TCP sockets in Python
  27. Is there a way to efficiently yield every file in a directory containing millions of files?
  28. HTML to IMAGE using Python
  29. UTF-8 HTML and CSS files with BOM (and how to remove the BOM with Python)
  30. Change the file extension for files in a folder?

Leave a Comment