copyfile avoiding overwrites and race conditions

[manuelg at gmail.com]

Larry Bates wrote:

> I guess my approach would be different.  To eliminate any race
> conditions, I would keep a small text file that always contained
> the next filename that is to be written.  Something like:
>
> nextfiletowrite=/path/filename006.dat
>
> I would try to get a lock on this file, read it, extract next
> filename, increment the counter portion of the filename,
> write it back out and unlock it.  Now I have the name of the
> file to write that is unique to my instance and I can write it
> without worrying about other processes.

Yes, that would work as well

but I get the feeling that

1) most people don't write to an automatically incrementing filename
2) the few who do don't sweat the race condition

Thanks for your reply

Manuel