[Python-Dev] small PATCH to fix os.fsync on OS X (original) (raw)

Scott Dial scott+python-dev at scottdial.com
Thu Aug 7 07:44:58 CEST 2008

Richard Boulton wrote:

I can't think of a situation where it would be useful to do an fsync() in which you don't want the data to be flushed as far as possible. If you're bothering to call fsync(), it's presumably because you need to guarantee that the data will be in a consistent state in the event of a failure (like a power cut). So I think it would be helpful for an fsync call in a high-level language to handle the details of this.

But the file descriptor functions provided by the posix module are not high-level calls, and in fact, that is part of the point of the module. There is a noticeable performance penalty for waiting on F_FULLSYNC to complete, and a programmer who is already going outside of the normal mode of python file-handling (using file objects) should have a choice in the matter.

-Scott

-- Scott Dial scott at scottdial.com scodial at cs.indiana.edu

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