How to know whether a Text file write is complete or file is being writen by another process?

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There is a file copying is being done in our C# program. At the moment it's just copying when the file is available on a shared location which is written by some external 3rd party s/w.

When our program is copying this text file it may not be fully written to the disk, in that case partially written text file is being read by our App. Is there a way to know whether file is completely written to disk.

Currently what we do is we wait our IO process thread to wait for couple of mins if the file is just created in order to ensure it's fully copied. But in case of slow network, it might get delayed and the problem would come up.

Any idea on this, a flag/file property to check this?

Posted 16-Oct-12 23:56pm

Pasan Eeriyagama

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Sushil Mate · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-17T00:07:00

Solution 1

Something like this you can try.

C#

try
{
 using (FileStream fs = File.Open("FileName", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.ReadWrite,  FileShare.None))
  {
    //File copy                 
  }
}
catch (Exception)
{
   // File is in use. 
}

Or you can use this FileSystemWatcher [^]

Posted 17-Oct-12 0:07am

Sushil Mate

Updated 17-Oct-12 0:11am

v2

Comments

Pasan Eeriyagama 17-Oct-12 6:12am

thx, bt appreciate if there's a method we can use without exclusive Open because the other process might fail in such case. Isnt' it.

Sushil Mate 17-Oct-12 6:16am

it won't :) i guess you are single application is copying that file..
you can use filesystemwatcher class..
try first approach, if it is not suitable then go for filesystemwatcher.