Determining when a file has finished copying

[keith]

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Ethan Furman wrote:
> writeson wrote:
>> Guys,
>>
>> Thanks for your replies, they are helpful. I should have included in
>> my initial question that I don't have as much control over the program
>> that writes (pgm-W) as I'd like. Otherwise, the write to a different
>> filename and then rename solution would work great. There's no way to
>> tell from the os.stat() methods to tell when the file is finished
>> being copied? I ran some test programs, one of which continously
>> copies big files from one directory to another, and another that
>> continously does a glob.glob("*.pdf") on those files and looks at the
>> st_atime and st_mtime parts of the return value of os.stat(filename).
>>> From that experiment it looks like st_atime and st_mtime equal each
>> other until the file has finished being copied. Nothing in the
>> documentation about st_atime or st_mtime leads me to think this is
>> true, it's just my observations about the two test programs I've
>> described.
>>
>> Any thoughts? Thanks!
>> Doug
> 
> The solution my team has used is to monitor the file size.  If the file
> has stopped growing for x amount of time (we use 45 seconds) the file is
> done copying.  Not elegant, but it works.
> -- 
> Ethan
Also I think that matching the md5sums may work.  Just set up so that it
checks the copy's md5sum every couple of seconds (or whatever time
interval you want) and matches against the original's.  When they match
copying's done. I haven't actually tried this but think it may work.
Any more experienced programmers out there let me know if this is
unworkable please.
K
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