Is is possible to open a text file and read the contents while another application is updating the file, in such a way that it does not cause a lock conflict?
I need to monitor a log file from one application which is updated by another application each time an event occurs.
I do check if the file is in use before I try to read it, but that does not seem to work in all cases.
Thanks, Pieter
it depends on how the first app open that file.
i.e when calling CreateFile API to open a file, there is dwShareMode param which tells the api how to open it (if this was given 0, it can't be accessed from other applications IIRC).
otherwise there should be no problem with reading from that file.
if im not mistaken, to check if that file is being opened read only u can call
something like
CreateFile(pchar(fName), GENERIC_READ or GENERIC_WRITE, 0, nil, OPEN_EXISTING, FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL, 0) ;
Download Process Monitor from Sysinternals.
Open the filter dialog and add a "path" filter for your log file.
Start the log-writing application (I'll call this "logwriter").
Look for and click on the event where logwriter does a CreateFile.
Under "Detail", it should have "Desired Access: Generic Write". And it should have "ShareMode: Read", which corresponds to FILE_SHARE_READ in the call to CreateFile. What it means is, "I, logwriter, permit others to read my file".
Now run your log-reading application ("logreader"), and do the same exercise.
The Detail should have "Desired Access: Generic Read". And it should have "ShareMode: Read, Write", which means, "I, logreader, permit others, including logwriter, to read and write to the log file".
Those are the most sensible values, I think, and they will prevent locking. Other combinations may be permissible. There is a table here.
Now, you haven't said what happens when it "does not seem to work in all cases". What to do next will really depend on the details. Hopefully the above will give you enough information to work out what is going wrong.
You won't get a lock conflict because the writing application is very unlikely to have locked the file. Doing what you suggest generally works without problems (it's what the UNIX tail -f command does) and those minor glitches that do occur can be ignored. I've written a couple of log monitoring apps in te past that worked like this, with no problems.
Try using FileSystemWatcher to get events when a file is updated.
A more delphi friendly link
Quite apart from getting the file sharing to work right which may be impossible depending on what the other program requests, some programs will close the file between accesses.
I have had success in the past with my program waiting for the file to become available, then quickly opening it, grabbing the needed data and closing it. At least in DOS an attempt to access a locked file caused a few retries, and I bumped up this setting, so that if the other program tried for the file while I had it they would simply be delayed and never see an error.
I was even able to update the file (I made sure NOT to close it in between!) without the other program ever knowing a thing.
Ugly as sin but we couldn't change the other program so it was the only way to get the job done. It was deployed in-house for years, I never heard a peep from the users of that system. It finally went away when the machinery the other program controlled was retired.
XpoLog will do the trick without changing your env or code, XpoLog log monitor
Avar is right - you are at the mercy of the writing program here. If they are locking the file, then there are a couple of things you can do:
1 - Check for a change in the "last modified" date time - if that changes, then you know something has happened.
2 - If the mod datetime did change, then (depending on the size of the file) it might be good enough to create a copy of the file and check that.
we use "Tail for win32",
i know its not delphi but it might be useful
http://tailforwin32.sourceforge.net/
Related
Found this this post ISAPI web application hanging if FastReport.PrepareReport is called
It helped solving my problem partially. As well I´ve turned Wisiyng property to False on frxRichView. Since I'm retunrnig a base 64 string I've also tryed switched loading from StrToStream/LoadFromStream to LoadFromFile. The problem persist with multiple acess, 2 out of 10 process can finish loading my Pdf file. All the others requests hangs until timeout. Does anyone have an idea what else can I do? is there anyother way to retunr rtf format into Fastreport report Thanks.
I could only get time-out error using Selenium to test multiples request from the client side.
Update: I've figured that just having a TfrxRichView component in the report causes the hanging, it doesn't even need to have a rtf text on it. Replacing it to a memo all request are answered.
UPDATE: Got a answer from fast report and I wold like your opinion.
ok,
I had similar problems, and it is not easy to find out the reason, but maybe you can find your solution in between my considerations..
1) Stack Size
When ran in IIS your ISAPI is only a DLL called by a process, you are not the main process so you have to pay attention to stack dimension.
Normally a Delphi application have a default stack size of 1Mb, in ISAPI DLL you will have only 256Kb of stack.
Maybe you are facing a stack overflow exception.. it can explain why it does not occurr always but only in some circumstances..
2) Trapped Exception
In general you get some error during the preparation of report (aka all the job of working with data, expressions, variables, formulas etc etc..) can bring to a trapped exception. You may be unable to see it from outside but code execution was broken somwhere and report preparation had not finished.
3) MessageBoxes and/or standard Exceptions
when running in ISAPI you should not output anything to user interface,
maybe a message dialog (or an exception) can bring to unexpected behaviour.
4) Global Var
You should avoid global var because in ISAPI they will be common across threads
So, if you have sources, debug the application.. at first exception you should understand where is your problem..
If you have not sources.. chek the above list.. I hope you can find some useful information.
You have two ways to solve this:
1- Try to recreate this behavior while debugging your ISAPI DLL. If you are lucky, you can identify the thread that is hanging your application. Sometimes this is hard or even impossible to recreate.
2- If you have access to the hung ISAPI application instance, use a tool like SysInternals Process Explorer to create a minidump file. Your application must be built using full debug symbols and you should have the corresponding map file. With one (or more - even better) dump files obtained from your hung application plus the map file, you can use another tool, WinDbg to analyze it and find the cause. (Sometimes) WinDbg can show exactly which thread is hanging the whole application and the line of code that causes it.
If you have never done that, I must warn you that this kind of analysis is almost a gamble... You have to use several different tools with little
or no documentation, read heaps of technical info in various places. In the end, sometimes it works wonderfully and sometimes it fails miserably.
Because debugging ISAPI is not obvious, but also because I wanted to be able to switch easily between more different hosting solutions — and wanted to update my website on the fly without a restart of the web-server/service — I created xxm. It has a singular interface to the HTTP context, your DLL gets loaded by either a IIS ISAPI handler, or a HTTP.SYS handler, or an Apache httpd module, or for debugging locally you can just set xxmHttp.exe as host application to get IIS out of the way.
I am importing some legacy code into an iOS app that uses stdout for some diagnostic output. Of course, iOS does not like you to write to stdout at all, and I need to get that output anyway. I would like to redirect this output to a file, then use the same legacy code again, redirecting the output to a different file. Does anyone know of a way to do this?
I've tried the simplistic
freopen(p, "w", stderr);
This does work--but only once. After using this call, all output to stdout is forever redirected. That's OK, but subsequent calls to redirect the output to a new location cause system instability that eventually leads to a crash. (I have tested this running from XCode, but not directly from a rebooted iPad. I don't know for sure the instability persists if not running in XCode using DEBUG mode.)
I've also tried the method in this post. This works, too, but does not return the system to its original state, and again, only works once. (If you try this at home, include Apple's <unisys.h> instead of <io.h>, and leave the _ off of calls like _dup and _dup2.)
I really don't want to have to go through the code and replace all uses of printf, etc to use an explicit file. In addition to being time consuming, error prone, and ugly, the code is open source. I don't expect the original authors would appreciate my changes, and I don't really want to have to reintegrate the changes each time the original project is updated.
Thoughts?
Is there any way to delete a file when its using by any program or other process in windows?
I searched and found this 2 ways:
1- using RunOnce key in Registry;
I'm not gonna use this because i dont want to wait for windows restart or anything else... prefer to do it ontime!
2- using the way declared in this page: http://www.delphipages.com/forum/showthread.php?t=201190
the problem here is its useful under NT windows, i need a way works on all Windowses!
Thank you.
the problem here is its useful under NT windows, i need a way works on all Windowses!
All modern desktop Windowses (XP, Vista, 7) are also NT. Do you really need to work with NT<4 or Win98? Or even Win CE/Mobile/Phone? Probably not.
If you need to delete an open file straight away, about the only thing you can do is attach to each process using debugger privileges, see if it has any handles open on the file, and if so close them underneath it. You can do this the manual way using eg Process Explorer. Many applications won't react well to having their files closed on them; expect them to exception out when they try to do something with the dead handle.
Unfortunately there is no option in Windows to have Unix-style files that can exist attached to a file handle independently of being stored under a filename on disc.
You cant delete a file when someone is using it. No matter how hard you try, windows will not let you. It can work with some files, but in general it does not work.
What you can try is postpone the deletion, when no one is using the file. You can:
1 - use RunOnce, but you dont want that.
2 - Wait in a loop, trying to delete the file. Pseudo code:
DeleteFile
Check if you was able to delete or if file still exists.
if you are able to delete, then exit loop.
That is the best you can do, and what i could remeber.
Try MoveFileEx with MOVEFILE_DELAY_UNTIL_REBOOT flag. Will postpone move or delete action until reboot.
Edit:
If you don't whant to restart the only option is to close those handles. ProcessExplorer does that and works all the time and I have not seen any process to crash. See more info about enumeration handles in a process at
http://www.codeguru.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-176997.html. But keep in mint that you should enumerate all processes in the system and behave different on Vista+ (you need to be elevated)
Your files are most likely locked because some process has a handle open to them. That is the most common reason for the Access denied result when deleting or moving a file.
A really blunt way is to close that handle.
Then Handles tool from SysInternals (you can download the sources too) can do that for you: I have been successfully using that.
Note 1: You need administrative privileges to use it.
Note 2: Closing a handle from another process is considered very rude, and can make that process unstable.
A very simple situation. I'm working on an application in Delphi 2007 which is often compiled as 'Release' but still runs under a debugger. And occasionally it will run under SilkTest too, for regression testing. While this is quite fun I want to do something special...
I want to detect if my application is running within a debugger/regression-tester and if that's the case, I want the application to know which tool is used! (Thus, when the application crashes, I could report this information in it's error report.)
Any suggestions, solutions?
You can check the parent process that started your application.
With CreateToolhelp32Snapshot/Process32First/Process32Next get the parent PID (PROCESSENTRY32.th32ParentProcessID or TProcessEntry32.th32ParentProcessID) for your application PID. Then get the filename for the parent PID to compare with the applications you want to check for, like SilkTest.
Check this article for code usage.
In addition to IsDebuggerPresent and CheckRemoteDebuggerPresent, you can also query PEB.BeingDebugged (PEB is Process Environment Block, to get PEB you must query TEB, which is the Thread Enviroment Block).
You're probably looking for the IsDebuggerPresent function.
To detect SilkTest, you could try to attach to a DLL which is used only by SilkTest in order to detect its presence. For example, if the Open Agent is attached to a process, Win32HookDll_x86.dll or Win32HookDll_amd64.dll will be present (the names can be easily found out with a tool like Process Explorer.
You can also do
if DebugHook <> 0 then ...
I want to write to/delete a file but sometimes I get a crash if the file is in use by another program. How do I check to see whether the file is opened by another process or I can open it for writing?
The problem is, that between the time you check to see if you could get exclusive access and opening the file, something else gets exclusive access to the file, and you get the exception anyway.
The only fool proof way to see if you can get an exclusive lock on a file is to try and get an exclusive lock on the file, if you get it you have it.
If not, you catch the exception, and either
Go do something else
Wait a while and try again
It's one of life’s situations where it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission :)
There is a new way to get the origin of file locking for Vista and up here:
http://www.remkoweijnen.nl/blog/2011/01/03/cannot-access-files-but-need-the-origin/
UserMode:
The best way to write to a locked file is to ask the user to close it in the other process. In batch processes you should ignore such a file and log the problem. Providing the name of the other process is a very good way to find a solution for the user.
Not sure in which programming language you'd like to check if you can write to a file. In Java, java.io.File.canWrite() can do the job for you.
General:
In UNIX-like OS, you can use the lsof command.
If you want to see which program holds a handle to your file, use the Process Monitor (download from MicroSoft).
This tool has a command line interface, so you could use your language's scripting interface (for example java.lang.Process) to run the tool and display a useful error message.
IsFileInUse as given in http://delphi.about.com/cs/adptips1999/a/bltip0999_3.htm