From: Andrew Savige <ajsavige@...>
Date: 2007-08-12T17:05:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Sorting a logfile, how would you write it?

--- William James <w_a_x_man@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Of course.  But I'm willing to take that miniscule chance when
> I'm doing a write to a small file that takes a fraction of a
> second.

That may be an acceptable risk for a program written for private use.
Not so for a production program. After all, impatient users often
press [CTRL-C] in my experience, and that could cause corruption
if it occurred while the file was being rewritten.

Certainly, such a program would fail code review at my company for
anything we send to our clients.

> The question remains:  doesn't using a temp file cause more
> disk fragmentation than writing directly to the original file?

Probably ... though correctness should come before performance
(I'll refrain from quoting Donald Knuth at you ;-).
And, in this case, any performance degradation with modern file
systems should be negligible.

Cheers,
/-\



      
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