Looking for general advice on complex program

[Cameron Simpson]

On 16Jul2011 10:34, Josh English <Joshua.R.English at gmail.com> wrote:
| I found a FileLock (lost the link and it's not in the code) that uses
| context managers to create a ".lock" file in the same directory of the
| file. It uses os.unlink to delete the .lock file but I don't know if
| this deletes the file or just removes it from the directory and leaves
| the memory filled.

os.unlink removes the filename. On all sane systems, if that is the last
reference to the file (no other names, no open file handles) then the
memory/storage is also released.

| If it does, I don't know if the OS will overwrite
| that memory. I'm afraid of taking up lots of space that I don't need
| with this program.

Don't be.

| The docs indicate that Unix recovers the memory, but I'm not sure about Windows.

I confess to disliking Windows, but I do not believe it is that broken.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

Last month, my alumni/ae association sent out a questionnaire. One of the
questions they asked was my/my household's annual income. The choices were:
(a) Less than $25,000, (b) $25,001-50,000, (c) $50,001-100,000,
(d) $100,001-250,000, (e) $250,001-500,000, (f) $500,001-1,000,000,
(g) $1,000,000 or more. Yeah, right. Nice median.
        - Dan Hillman, dcah100 at cus.cam.ac.uk