[Python-ideas] BackupFile

[Kim Gräsman]

Hi Terry, and all,

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 10:33 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>
> It seems to me that what you actually *want* to do, given your other
> responses, is to make a temporary altered copy of the settings file and get
> the programs to use the *copy*. That way, other users would see the original
> undistrubed and a crash would at worst leave the copy undeleted. (Whether
> you want to copy alterations back is a different matter.) I presume the
> problem is that the program has the name of the settings file hard-coded.
> One possibility might be to run the program in a virtual environment with
> its temporary copy. (But I have 0 experience with that. I only know that
> venv has been added to 3.3.)

Thanks for all your alternative strategies! In this case, the third
party is a combination of Python, shell script, and executable
binaries in at least three different processes, and I'm pretty happy
with the modify-do work-restore model for this batch script.

I appreciate the input on the suggested idea, it gave me some new
error modes to worry about, even if most of them don't apply for this
specific case.

- Kim