Check whether the file is in use by an other user

[fish]

Hi, at first I just want to thank you for the great tutorial, but I still have a problem.
I am working with a file which is accessible by many users via network. When I open the excel-file I want to check, whether the file is opened by an other user or not. I just want to work with it if it is not opened.
A simple die() if it is in use would be enough for me.
So, is it possible to check whether an other user has opened the file?

Great Regards,
- fish

[wazoox]

IIRC Windows locks the file when opened. You may be able to check the file lock state, maybe something like this (I have no windows box to test):

open my $fh, "/some/file" or die "can't open!";

# try/catch file locking
eval { flock $fh, 'LOCK_EX' or die "can't lock!" };
if ( $@) {
    warn "open file!" && exit;
}

[fish]

Thanks for your response. I tried your code and it's not bad but not exactly what I expected. Instead of showing an error-message if the file is opened the program waits until the file is getting closed. That is not bad, but kind of useless for my problem.

I am sure we are pretty near to a solution, so can somebody tell me how it works - please ;)

Best regards,
- fish

[wazoox]

See the flock documentation to check the various (and numerous) available flags, there is probably one of them that'll do what you want :) BTW you really should have posted this in its own thread, because it's a problem completely unrelated to the scope of this tutorial.

[fish]

For those of you who are interessted in the topic. I solved the problem by myself.

sysopen(FH, $file, O_WRONLY|O_EXCL) or die $!; works fine for me and it even works if the file is opened via a shared folder.

Finally I want to apologize for my offtopic-postings. I thougt the "fileInUse"-check would be possible with a Win32::OLE-function and because of that I posted here and did not create a new thread. I hope I will do better in future.

Best regards from sunny Germany.