From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2009-05-03T03:57:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Read and re-write file with one open?

On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 4:05 AM, 7stud -- <bbxx789_05ss@yahoo.com> wrote:

> So let's ask that question about the solution you've decided to adopt.
> Suppose your program is at the point where it has written half of the
> altered data back to the file, and the file contains half altered data
> and half original data.  Then your program crashes.  What are you left
> with?
>
> The "rewriting a file" issue has been hashed out by many programmers for
> decades.  You can either try to come up with your own screwy method, or
> you can adopt an accepted idiom.  Within the accepted idiom, modules
> like Tempfile were created to deal with the problem of overwriting an
> existing file name, and it provides a shortcut.

Thanks for going into the detail here.  I threw the atomic save
solution out there, but didn't give much background, and this
establishes a much better motivation for it.

-greg