PyPI wants me to enable 2FA just because I maintain this package, and both that and the mess resulting from a stunt of mine, I thought it'd be a good time to deprecate this package. Python 3 has os.replace and os.rename which probably do well enough of a job for most usecases.
Atomic file writes.
from atomicwrites import atomic_write
with atomic_write('foo.txt', overwrite=True) as f:
f.write('Hello world.')
# "foo.txt" doesn't exist yet.
# Now it does.
See API documentation for more low-level interfaces.
Features that distinguish it from other similar libraries (see Alternatives and Credit):
Race-free assertion that the target file doesn't yet exist. This can be controlled with the overwrite parameter.
Windows support, although not well-tested. The MSDN resources are not very explicit about which operations are atomic. I'm basing my assumptions off a comment by Doug Cook, who appears to be a Microsoft employee:
Question: Is MoveFileEx atomic if the existing and new files are both on the same drive?
The simple answer is "usually, but in some cases it will silently fall-back to a non-atomic method, so don't count on it".
The implementation of MoveFileEx looks something like this: [...]
The problem is if the rename fails, you might end up with a CopyFile, which is definitely not atomic.
If you really need atomic-or-nothing, you can try calling NtSetInformationFile, which is unsupported but is much more likely to be atomic.
Simple high-level API that wraps a very flexible class-based API.
Consistent error handling across platforms.
It uses a temporary file in the same directory as the given path. This ensures that the temporary file resides on the same filesystem.
The temporary file will then be atomically moved to the target location: On POSIX, it will use rename if files should be overwritten, otherwise a combination of link and unlink. On Windows, it uses MoveFileEx through stdlib's ctypes with the appropriate flags.
Note that with link and unlink, there's a timewindow where the file might be available under two entries in the filesystem: The name of the temporary file, and the name of the target file.
Also note that the permissions of the target file may change this way. In some situations a chmod can be issued without any concurrency problems, but since that is not always the case, this library doesn't do it by itself.
On POSIX, fsync is invoked on the temporary file after it is written (to flush file content and metadata), and on the parent directory after the file is moved (to flush filename).
fsync does not take care of disks' internal buffers, but there don't seem to be any standard POSIX APIs for that. On OS X, fcntl is used with F_FULLFSYNC instead of fsync for that reason.
On Windows, _commit is used, but there are no guarantees about disk internal buffers.
Atomicwrites is directly inspired by the following libraries (and shares a minimal amount of code):
ctypes instead of PyWin32 originated there.PyWin32) was originally taken from there.Other alternatives to atomicwrites include:
overwrite parameter. It is lacking Windows support though.Licensed under the MIT, see LICENSE.
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