Re^5: Rename unreliable on Windows

[tobyink]

is there an easy workaround (apart from disabling the backup sw)?

You could just keep trying to rename it...

1 until rename $file1, $file2;

Of course, if a file can genuinely never be renamed, this will cause your script to keep trying forever. Better to limit to a finite number of attempts at renaming.

my $attempts;
while (not rename $file1, $file2)
{
  $attempts++;
  die "Could not rename file: $!" if $attempts > 7;
  sleep $attempts;
}

[MidLifeXis]

You could also throw it into a queue of items "to deal with later".

[elef]

Thanks. Hoping that copying is more robust than renaming, I tried this:


    unlink "rename2.txt" or die "Can't delete file: $!";
    copy ("rename1.txt", "rename2.txt") or die "Can't copy file: $!";
    unlink "rename1.txt" or die "Can't delete file: $!";


Errors became less frequent, but they're still there. I'll try your suggestion. I really like the idea of sleeping increasing intervals between attempts, too.

-------------------
Edit: did the test, and the solution works. I also added some reporting to see how many extra attempts are needed for the renamings to succeed. The second attempt was sufficient every time, and it was needed ~50 times before the script got to 10000 loops. I'll implement this with 5 attempts max (just in case the backup sw spends more time on larger files) and forget about the issue. Thanks.