Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bbn!husc6!bu-cs!att!cbnewsh!ho5cad!wjc From: wjc@ho5cad.ATT.COM (Bill Carpenter) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug Subject: Re: File locking on shared filesystems Message-ID: Date: 7 May 89 10:04:17 GMT References: <8905070035.AA13356@transit.cs.brown.edu> Sender: nntp@cbnewsh.ATT.COM Distribution: gnu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 19 In-reply-to: cs126045@CS.BROWN.EDU's message of 7 May 89 00:35:50 GMT In article <8905070035.AA13356@transit.cs.brown.edu> cs126045@CS.BROWN.EDU writes: : If the lock was put there by someone on another machine, the process : which locked the file will not be found whether it is still around or : not, and emacs will steal the lock without warning. : ... : Best solution (?): store the hostname in the file along with the : process id, and rsh over to that host to see if the process is still : around. This might be unacceptably slow... is there a better way? Nice idea, but ... Even supposing there was a way to make sure this went fast enough, who said that sharing filesystems implied TCP/IP? (If this were an "easy" problem, we probably wouldn't see all those postings in other groups about how to synchronize mailbox access in the same kind of environment.) -- -- Bill Carpenter att!ho5cad!wjc or attmail!bill