On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Luhmann <[email protected]> wrote: > > When there are no more references to an open file object, will it close, or > the file will just remain open, forever unreachable?
When an open file object is garbage-collected it will be closed. In current versions of CPython GC happens when there are no more references to an object but other versions of Python (Jython, IronPython) have different behaviour. There is no guarantee that an object will ever be GDed. My recommendation: for production code, explicitly close files. A 'with' block is the easiest way to do this. For quick-and-dirty code running under CPython, don't worry about it. (Though I admit to being paranoid enough to always explicitly close a file that is open for writing.) Kent _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
