[Tutor] how to check if a file is being used by another person or application before writing to it?

[Jeff Peery]

hello, 
 
I need to read/write from/to a file although I do not want to read/write a file that is being used by another person or application. is there a way to check if a file is already open by another person? this way I could use some sort of clock to periodically check if a specific file is open and when it isn't open then I could do what I need to it. 
 
similarly is there a way to check if a file has been written to? I suppose I would do something like periodically check the size of a particular file and if it increased then I would know it was written to. I didn't see anything in the python documentation for geting the size of a file. how is this normally performed? 
 
thanks.
 
Jeff
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