New submission from Javen Wang <jave...@gmail.com>: I encountered a very strange issue in file flush operation in Windows. Here's the scenario of my application:
1. The main thread of my application will create makefiles sequentially. 2. Once a makefile is generated, launch a separate process calling nmake.exe to run it in parallell. The main thread then create another makefile until no more makefiles to create. 3. The number of new processes is limited by command line options. My application has been running for almost a year without any problem. But, after I made some changes recently to the content of makefile generated, "nmake.exe" in separate process sometimes complains that the makefile was not found. But when I went into the directory, the makefile was there. Because I didn't change any thing related to file creation and the new makefiles are a little bit less than before, I guessed that the makefile just created hasn't been flushed to disk because of size change so the new process could not see it in a short time. So I decided add code to force flush file buffer after writing the file content (I didn't flush the file explicitly before). I did it like below: Fd = open(File, "w") Fd.write(Content) Fd.flush() os.fsync(Fd.fileno()) Fd.close() The strangest thing happened. The "makefile" missing happened more frequently than no flush operation. I searched the web but no answer there. Finally I tried to use Windows file API to create the file via pywin32 extension. The problem's gone. import win32file Fd = win32file.CreateFile( File, win32file.GENERIC_WRITE, 0, None, win32file.CREATE_ALWAYS, win32file.FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL, None ) win32file.WriteFile(Fd, str(Content), None) win32file.FlushFileBuffers(Fd) win32file.CloseHandle(Fd) I tried writing small python extension in C to make use Windows API to create file like above. It also works well, even I removed the FlushFileBuffers() calling. I think that there's a bug in Python file buffer mechanism. ---------- components: Windows messages: 79829 nosy: javen72 severity: normal status: open title: os.fsync() doesn't work as expect in Windows type: behavior versions: Python 2.5 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue4944> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com