Re: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process?

[graff]

I'm afraid I don't understand what you gain by having 2.4 million lines of data attached as part of the perl script. Have you really not tried putting those first 13 lines into a separate file, so that the 2.4 million lines of data can sit alone (without the script attached) in a separate file, which your separate perl script then reads "in the normal way"?

Apart from that, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a "modern" windows OS is still having (or making) trouble when more than one process wants to open the same file, and one of those processes wants write access on the file.

(Have you tried putting print "starting now\n"; as the 3rd line, to see if you get any output at all before the error message?)

[BrowserUk]

Have you really not tried putting those first 13 lines into a separate file, ...

Of course, that exactly what I did. I posted the error because I've never encountered it before and wondered if anyone knew what caused it.

As for the why. Why do you ever put DATA in a script? Same reasons apply.

For the specifics of this occasion. I'd just copied the data out of another much bigger file with mixed content -- rather than write what would be a moderately complex parser -- to see what if any sense I could make of it. It was sat in the paste buffer when I opened a new file in my editor to write my scratch script and thought, why bother with a separate file...

Then the error occurred and the rest you see here.