Reading file issue

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 10:47 PM, loial <jldunn2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am parseing a file to extract data, but am seeing the file being updated even though I never explicitly write to the file. It is possible that another process is doing this at some later time, but I just want to check that opening the file as follows and ignoring a record would not result in that record being removed from the file.
>
> I'm damned sure it wouldn't, but just wanted to check with the experts!.
>
>         for line in open("/home/john/myfile"):

Absolutely not. You're opening the file (by default) for reading only.
That's not going to edit the file in any way. (It might cause the
directory entry to be rewritten, eg last-access time, but not the file
contents.) Your expectation is 100% correct.

ChrisA