Re: Safe File Update (atomic)
On Mon, Jan 03, 2011 at 12:26:29PM +0100, Olaf van der Spek wrote:
>
> Given that the issue has come up before so often, I expected there to
> be a FAQ about it.
Your asking the question over (and over... and over...) doesn't make
it an FAQ. :-)
Aside from your asking over and over, it hasn't come up that often,
actually. The right answer has been known for decades, and it's is
very simple; write a temp file, copy over the xattr's and ACL's if you
care (in many cases, such as an application's private state files, it
won't care, so it can skip this step --- it's only the more generic
file editors that would need to worry about such things --- but when's
the last time anyone has really worried about xattr's on a .c file?),
fsync(), and rename().
This is *not* hard. People who get it wrong are just being lazy.
In the special case of dpkg, where they are writing a moderate number
of large files, and they care about syncing the files without causing
journal commits, the use of sync_file_range() on the files followed by
a series of fdatasync() calls has solved their issues as far as I know.
- Ted
Reply to: