Can I break the rules for POSIX locks

[TaraMc]

Thanks JimH, your advice made me do some extra reading and I discovered that you cannot create a write lock while a read lock is in place for the same area of the file. This does leave me with a troublesome situation however. I am trying to allow multiple users access to a file, i think it is inefficent to establish a read/write situation if all a client wants to do is view that file, so if a second client than wants to write to that file how do i go about this (i have an inkling that it might be semaphors but i was just wondering if it was possible to break the rules instead ) cheers!

[paradox]

I am not entirely sure of what your talking about, but I think what your wanting is forking. This allows for multiple copies of the same program to be running and accessing files at the same time. I have a feeling this is what your talking about.

Aragorn

[Stuka]

Not sure if it's implemented in the current version of the pthread library on Linux, but there are read/write locks available there - pthread_rwlock_init() might be a good place to start looking.