how to count lines in a file ?

[Michele Simionato]

Can somebody provide a simple example where the idiom

file(name,'w').write(something)

fails, in the sense that the file is not closed or something is not written ?
I tried to hang the program with a memory overload

file(name,'w').write(something)
for i in range(2*10**8): pass

(this doesn't crash my machine but the CTRL-C doesn't work and I have to
kill the precess by hand) but still at the end something is written in the 
file name. How safe is Python implicit file closing ? In which practical
situations can fail and how dangerous can be ?

-- 
Michele Simionato - Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
210 Allen Hall Pittsburgh PA 15260 U.S.A.
Phone: 001-412-624-9041 Fax: 001-412-624-9163
Home-page: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/