How to programmatically discern whether or not a file is use

[Gerhard Häring]

Techead wrote:
> How can a Python program determine whether or not a file
> is use by another process? [...]

There is no function in the standard library. There are
system-dependent tools that you could interface using os.popen and
friends. If you want to get fancy, you can grab their source code and
implement a library in C.

On Linux the tool you'll want is 'fuser':

#v+
gerhard at mephisto:/tmp$ fuser /var/log/messages
gerhard at mephisto:/tmp$ su
Password: 
mephisto:/tmp# fuser /var/log/messages
/var/log/messages:     395
mephisto:/tmp# ps ax|grep 395
  395 ?        S      0:00 /sbin/syslogd
mephisto:/tmp# exit
gerhard at mephisto:/tmp$ 
#v-

As you see this will need superuser privileges on some systems.

Gerhard
-- 
http://ghaering.de/