On Mon, 2 Jul 2007, Henrik Bengtsson wrote: > Hi, > > is there a (cross-platform) file-locking mechanism available in R (or > via some package)?
I don't believe there really is a cross-platform file-locking mechanism available to any language. File-locking is an OS feature, and the semantics differ. For those unfamiliar with this, the Wikipedia article is a good start (but ignores the POSIX lockf interface). > I am looking for a way to have one R session lock a file for > read/write access, while being updated/modified by another R session. > This will provide me with a-poor-mans parallelization method. It is > ok to have so called advisory looking (as in Unix), which are > non-mandatory to follow. If not available, I'll use lock files, but > there are some potential problems in creating such in an atomic way. Depends what you mean by 'atomic'. In R, the only way to have non-interruptible operations is via .Call or similar: the evaluator is interruptible at all times so it seems that this issue applies equally to all file locking from R. > Ideally I wish to have this working on all platforms. > > Cheers > > Henrik > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
