Determining when a file has finished copying

[Michiel Overtoom]

Ethan wrote:

> One more option may be to attempt to rename 
> the file -- if it's still open for copying, that will fail; 
> success indicates the copy is done.  

Caveat -- this is dependent on the operating system!

Windows will indeed not allow you to rename or delete a file that's still
open for writing by another process, at least not when the file is on a
local NTFS filesystem, but don't count on this on Unix or networked
filesystems.  There you can easily rename, move or delete a filename from a
directory whilst other processes still write to it. After all, a directory
is nothing else than a list of filenames which map to certain inodes.

Greetings,

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