[Tutor] lockfiles and timestamps and nested if's!

[Lance E Sloan]

kromag@nsacom.net wrote:
>     lockfile=open('\tmp\'+mybox, 'r')
>     timestamp=lockfile.readline()
>     print timestamp
>     lockfile.close()
>     if timestamp > time.time()-10:

This is probably not the cause of your problem, and it may not be a
problem at all.  It might just be me being a Python newbie.

Anyway, in the second line that I quoted above, wouldn't timestamp be a
string?  If so, what will happen when the string is compared with a
number on the fifth line?

I suspect that the condition will always fail or always pass because
timestamp is a string (probably with a trailing CR and/or LF) and is
very different from the float returned by time.time().  Whether it will
be pass or fail, I don't know.  I'm not sure how Python would compare
those two datatypes.

--
Lance E Sloan
Web Services, Univ. of Michigan: Full-service Web and database design,
development, and hosting.  Specializing in Perl & Python CGIs.
http://websvcs.itd.umich.edu/ - "Putting U on the Web"