Re: Significance of .GNUstepUDlock

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Monday, December 31, 2001, at 01:24 PM, Ravindra wrote:

> Hi,
>  
> We have an application developed using GNUStep. It reads defaults at 
> startup. We observed that there is a GNUstep file that gets created at 
> /GNUstep named .GNUstepUDlock that is preventing other instances of our 
> application from starting up till that file exists. Apparently what we 
> thought was, this file is created to protect the defaults from being 
> referenced at certain times and does not always get removed. We have 
> seen this behavior most often when the application was started, and 
> quickly stopped repeatedly. The file will go away on its own after 
> about 1 minute. At that time our application reads defaults properly 
> and functions properly. Because of the presence of this file for about 
> a minute, we are not able to start several instances of that 
> application quickly.
>  
> So my question is :
>  
> What is the purpose of this file and whether there is any way to stop 
> it from being created. If file is required to be created is it possible 
> to by pass this file access, so that other instances of the application 
> work free.

It's a lock file to protect defaults data while it is being updated.  
I'm not sure it is actually necessary in
the current implementation though.  If it ever fails to be removed 
(other than because your program crashes),
that's a bug and it would be nice to get a reproducable test program in 
order to fix it.  I have never seen a
copy of it left over except when a crash occurs.