Can os.remove followed by os.path.isfile disagree?

[Diez B. Roggisch]

 ppaterson at gmail.com wrote:

> Can os.path.isfile(x) ever return True after os.remove(x) has
> successfully completed? (Windows 2003,  Python 2.3)
> 
> We had a couple of failures in a server application that we cannot yet
> reproduce in a simple case. Analysis of the code suggests that the
> only possible explanation is that the following occurs,
> 
> os.remove(x)
> .... stuff
> if os.path.isfile(x):
>     raise "Ooops, how did we get here?"
> file(x, "wb").write(content)
> 
> We end up in the raise. By the time we get to look at the system the
> file is actually gone, presumably because of the os.remove.
> 
> The "stuff" is a handful of lines of code which don't take any
> significant time to perform. There are no "try" blocks to mask a
> failure in the os.remove call.
> 
> 
> The application is multithreaded so it is possible that another thread
> writes to the file between the "remove" and the "isfile", but at the
> end of the failure the file is actually not on the filesystem and I
> don't believe there is a way that the file could be removed again in
> this scenario.

Is the file on a network drive by any chance?

Diez