On 13/07/2012 19:28, Hans Mulder wrote:
On 13/07/12 19:59:59, Prasad, Ramit wrote:
I lean slightly towards the POSIX handling with the addition that
any additional write should throw an error. You are now saving to
a file that will not exist the moment you close it and that is
probably not expected.
Strictly speaking, the file does exist, it's just that there are no
names referring to it. When any handles to it are also closed, the file
_can_ truly be deleted.
As has been said before, in the *nix world, "unlink" _doesn't_ delete
a file, it deletes a name.
I'd say: it depends.
If the amount of data your script needs to process does not fit
in RAM, then you may want to write some of it to a temporary file.
On a Posix system, it's entirely normal to unlink() a temp file
first thing after you've created it. The expectation is that the
file will continue to exists, and be writeable, until you close it.
In fact, there's a function in the standard library named
tempfile.TemporaryFile that does exactly that: create a file
and unlink it immediately. This function would be useless
if you couldn't write to your temporary file.
It's possible to create a temporary file even in Windows.
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