TDM Rerun #7: File Sharing on Linux

In the Windows world we are used to file locking. It is something natural, something that permeates the operating system, something that we had to learn when we stopped using DOS. But for all practical purposes, Linux is Unix, and Unix was designed with different things in mind, one of which was openness and sharing. From the very old days, Unix has supported different kinds of file systems, including those that span a network. Remember, that was well before Windows, and file locking was something that was simply too expensive (in terms of time and network traffic) to be implemented. And that is why there is no locking on Linux.

- File Sharing on Linux, The Delphi Magazine 84, August 2002

The year was 2002, Kylix was still alive and I was planning to write some software for the new platform. Sadly, that never happened - other (Windows) projects were more important and before I came back to Kylix, it was more or less dead.

Still, this short excursion was responsible for my only Linux article. I took my  GpFileSync unit from TDB 68: Let's Cooperate and tried to adapt it to Linux. As it turned out, this was nearly an impossible mission. The ideas behind Unix file systems almost totally prevent its abuse in such direction. To make myself clear - it is certainly possible to use file system for locking, but there are big problems where you want to a) make the lock disappear if the program terminates abnormally, b) put the lock file on a networked location (NFS) or c) all of the above.

I ended with three less than perfect solutions. First used a simple lock file, second was an adaptation of the first that worked with the NFS 2 volums (both were not able to auto-delete the file-mutex on program termination) and third used fcntl() call (auto-delete worked well, but NFS was not fully supported). As far as I know, none of them was ever tested in a real-world application.

Links: article (PDF, 125 KB), source code (ZIP, 16 KB), current GpFileSync unit