Java FileLock for Reading and Writing

I have a process that will be called rather frequently from cron to read a file that has certain move related commands in it. My process needs to read and write to this data file - and keep it locked to prevent other processes from touching it during this time. A completely separate process can be executed by a user to (potential) write/append to this same data file. I want these two processes to play nice and only access the file one at a time.

The nio FileLock seemed to be what I needed (short of writing my own semaphore type files), but I'm having trouble locking it for reading. I can lock and write just fine, but when attempting to create lock when reading I get a NonWritableChannelException. Is it even possible to lock a file for reading? Seems like a RandomAccessFile is closer to what I need, but I don't see how to implement that.

Here is the code that fails:

FileInputStream fin = new FileInputStream(f);
FileLock fl = fin.getChannel().tryLock();
if(fl != null) 
{
  System.out.println("Locked File");
  BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fin));
  System.out.println(in.readLine());
          ...

The exception is thrown on the FileLock line.

java.nio.channels.NonWritableChannelException
 at sun.nio.ch.FileChannelImpl.tryLock(Unknown Source)
 at java.nio.channels.FileChannel.tryLock(Unknown Source)
 at Mover.run(Mover.java:74)
 at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

Looking at the JavaDocs, it says

Unchecked开发者_运维知识库 exception thrown when an attempt is made to write to a channel that was not originally opened for writing.

But I don't necessarily need to write to it. When I try creating a FileOutpuStream, etc. for writing purposes it is happy until I try to open a FileInputStream on the same file.

1. Are you aware that locking the file won't keep other processes from touching it unless they also use locks?
2. You have to lock via a writable channel. Get the lock via a RandomAccessFile in "rw" mode and then open your FileInputStream. Make sure to close both!

It would be better if you created the lock using tryLock(0L, Long.MAX_VALUE, true).

This creates a shared lock which is the right thing to do for reading.

tryLock() is a shorthand for tryLock(0L, Long.MAX_VALUE, false), i.e. it requests an exclusive write-lock.

I wrote a test program and bash commands to confirm the effectivity of the file lock:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.RandomAccessFile;
import java.nio.channels.FileLock;

public class FileWriterTest
{
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        if (args.length != 4)
        {
            System.out.println("Usage: FileWriterTest <filename> <string> <sleep ms> <enable lock>");
            System.exit(1);
        }

        String filename = args[0];
        String data = args[1];
        int sleep = Integer.parseInt(args[2]);
        boolean enableLock = Boolean.parseBoolean(args[3]);

        try (RandomAccessFile raFile = new RandomAccessFile(new File(filename), "rw"))
        {
            FileLock lock = null;
            if (enableLock)
            {
                lock = raFile.getChannel().lock();
            }

            Thread.sleep(sleep);
            raFile.seek(raFile.length());
            System.out.println("writing " + data + " in a new line; current pointer = " + raFile.getFilePointer());
            raFile.write((data+"\n").getBytes());

            if (lock != null)
            {
                lock.release();
            }
        }
    }
}

Run with this bash command to check it works:

for i in {1..1000}
do
java FileWriterTest test.txt $i 10 true &
done

You should see the writing only happening once every 10ms (from the outputs), and in the end all numbers to be present in the file.

Output:

/tmp wc -l test.txt
1000 test.txt
/tmp

The same test without the lock shows data being lost:

for i in {1..1000}
do
java FileWriterTest test.txt $i 10 false &
done

Output:

/tmp wc -l test.txt
764 test.txt
/tmp

It should be easy to modify it to test the tryLock instead.