writeson wrote:
Guys,Thanks for your replies, they are helpful. I should have included in my initial question that I don't have as much control over the program that writes (pgm-W) as I'd like. Otherwise, the write to a different filename and then rename solution would work great. There's no way to tell from the os.stat() methods to tell when the file is finished being copied? I ran some test programs, one of which continously copies big files from one directory to another, and another that continously does a glob.glob("*.pdf") on those files and looks at the st_atime and st_mtime parts of the return value of os.stat(filename). From that experiment it looks like st_atime and st_mtime equal each other until the file has finished being copied. Nothing in the documentation about st_atime or st_mtime leads me to think this is true, it's just my observations about the two test programs I've described. Any thoughts? Thanks! Doug
I guess the problem is "What is the definition of 'finished copying'?". There is no explicit operating system command that says "I'm done copying to this file and I won't add anything on to the end of it".
If I could not control the sending application, I would make an estimation of how long the longest file could possibly take to copy, double it and then only look at files where the st_ctime was at least that far in the past. What you suggest could work as well.
-Larry -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
