R/package.R

In gaborcsardi/filelock: Portable File Locking

#' Advisory File Locking and Unlocking
#'
#' There are two kinds of locks, *exclusive* and *shared*, see the
#' `exclusive` argument and other details below.
#'
#' @section Warning:
#' Always use special files for locking. I.e. if you want to restrict access
#' to a certain file, do *not* place the lock on this file. Create a special
#' file, e.g. by appending `.lock` to the original file name and place the
#' lock on that. (The `lock()` function creates the file for you, actually,
#' if it does not exist.) Reading from or writing to a locked file has
#' undefined behavior! (See more about this below at the Internals Section.)
#'
#' It is hard to determine whether and when it is safe to remove these
#' special files, so our current recommendation is just to leave them
#' around.
#'
#' It is best to leave the special lock file empty, simply because on some
#' OSes you cannot write to it (or read from it), once the lock is in place.
#'
#' @section Advisory Locks:
#' All locks set by this package might be advisory. A process that does not
#' respect this locking mechanism may be able to read and write the locked
#' file, or even remove it (assuming it has capabilities to do so).
#'
#' @section Unlock on Termination:
#' If a process terminates (with a normal exit, a crash or on a signal), the
#' lock(s) it is holding are automatically released.
#'
#' If the R object that represents the lock (the return value of `lock`)
#' goes out of scope, then the lock will be released automatically as
#' soon as the object is garbage collected. This is more of a safety
#' mechanism, and the user should still `unlock()` locks manually, maybe
#' using [base::on.exit()], so that the lock is released in case of errors
#' as well, as soon as possible.
#'
#' @section Special File Systems:
#' File locking needs support from the file system, and some *non-standard*
#' file systems do not support it. For example on network file systems
#' like NFS or CIFS, user mode file systems like `sshfs` or `ftpfs`, etc.,
#' support might vary. Recent Linux versions and recent NFS versions (from
#' version 3) do support file locking, if enabled.
#'
#' In theory it is possible to simply test for lock support, using two
#' child processes and a timeout, but `filelock` does not do this
#' currently.
#'
#' @section Locking Part of a File:
#' While this is possible in general, `filelock` does not support it
#' currently. The main purpose of `filelock` is to lock using special
#' lock files, and locking part of these is not really useful.
#'
#' @section Internals on Unix:
#' On Unix (i.e. Linux, macOS, etc.), we use `fcntl` to acquire and
#' release the locks. You can read more about it here:
#' <https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/File-Locks.html>
#'
#' Some important points:
#' * The lock is put on a file descriptor, which is kept open, until the
#'   lock is released.
#' * A process can only have one kind of lock set for a given file.
#' * When any file descriptor for that file is closed by the process, all
#'   of the locks that process holds on that file are released, even if
#'   the locks were made using other descriptors that remain open.
#'   Note that in R, using a one-shot function call to modify the file
#'   opens and closes a file descriptor to it, so the lock will be
#'   released. (This is one of the main reasons for using special lock
#'   files, instead of putting the lock on the actual file.)
#' * Locks are not inherited by child processes created using fork.
#' * For lock requests with finite timeout intervals, we set an alarm, and
#'   temporarily install a signal handler for it. R is single threaded,
#'   so no other code can be running, while the process is waiting to
#'   acquire the lock. The signal handler is restored to its original value
#'   immediately after the lock is acquired or the timeout expires.
#'   (It is actually restored from the signal handler, so there should be
#'   no race conditions here. However, if multiple `SIGALRM` signals are
#'   delivered via a single call to the signal handler, then alarms might
#'   get lost. Currently base R does not use the `SIGALRM` signal for
#'   anything, but other packages might.)
#'
#' @section Internals on Windows:
#' On Windows, `LockFileEx` is used to create the lock on the file.
#' If a finite timeout is specified for the lock request, asynchronous
#' (overlapped) I/O is used to wait for the locking event with a timeout.
#' See more about `LockFileEx` on the first hit here:
#' <https://www.google.com/search?q=LockFileEx>
#'
#' Some important points:
#' * `LockFileEx` locks are mandatory (as opposed to advisory), so indeed
#'   no other processes have access to the locked file. Actually, even the
#'   locking process has no access to it through a different file handle,
#'   than the one used for locking. In general, R cannot read from the
#'   locked file, and cannot write to it. (Although, the current R version
#'   does not fail, it just does nothing, which is quite puzzling.)
#'   Remember, always use a special lock file, instead of putting the lock
#'   on the main file, so that you are not affected by these problems.
#' * Inherited handles do not provide access to the child process.
#'
#' @param path Path to the file to lock. If the file does not exist, it
#'   will be created, but the directory of the file must exist.
#'   *Do not place the lock on a file that you want to
#'   read from or write to!* *Always use a special lock file. See details
#'   below.
#' @param exclusive Whether to acquire an exclusive lock. An exclusive
#'   lock gives the process exclusive access to the file, no other
#'   processes can place any kind of lock on it. A non-exclusive lock is a
#'   shared lock. Multiple processes can hold a shared lock on the same
#'   file. A process that writes to a file typically requests an
#'   exclusive lock, and a process that reads from it typically requests a
#'   shared lock.
#' @param timeout Timeout to acquire the lock in milliseconds. If `Inf`,
#'   then the process will wait indefinitely to acquire the lock. If zero,
#'   then the function it returns immediately, with or without acquiring
#'   the lock
#' @param lock The lock object to unlock. It is not an error to try to
#'   unlock an already unlocked lock. It is not possible to lock an
#'   unlocked lock again, a new lock has to be requested.
#'
#' @return `lock` returns a `filelock_lock` object if the lock was
#'   successfully acquired, and `NULL` if a timeout happened.
#'
#'   `unlock` returns `TRUE`, always.
#'
#' @section Examples:
#' ```
#' ## -------------------------------------------------------------
#' ## R process 1 gets an exclusive lock
#' ## Warning: if you want to lock file 'myfile', always create a
#' ## separate lock file instead of placing the lock on this file directly!
#' lck <- lock(mylockfile)
#'
#' ## -------------------------------------------------------------
#' ## R process 2 fails to acquire a lock
#' lock(mylockfile, timeout = 0)
#'
#' ## Let's wait for 5 seconds, before giving up
#' lock(mylockfile, timeout = 5000)
#'
#' ## Wait indefinetely
#' lock(mylockfile, timeout = Inf)
#' ```
#'
#' @export
#' @useDynLib filelock, .registration = TRUE, .fixes = "c_"

lock <- function(path, exclusive = TRUE, timeout = Inf) {
  stopifnot(is_string(path))
  stopifnot(is_flag(exclusive))
  stopifnot(is_timeout(timeout))

  ## Inf if encoded as -1 in our C code
  if (timeout == Inf) timeout <- -1L

  dn <- dirname(path)
  ndn <- normalizePath(dn)
  if (!file.exists(ndn)) {
    stop("Directory of lock file does not exist: '", dn, "'")
  }
  path <- file.path(ndn, basename(path))

  res <- .Call(c_filelock_lock, enc2utf8(path), exclusive, as.integer(timeout))

  if (is.null(res)) res else structure(res, class = "filelock_lock")
}

#' @export
#' @rdname lock

unlock <- function(lock) {
  if (!inherits(lock, "filelock_lock")) {
    stop("`unlock()` needs a lock object, not a file name")
  }
  .Call(c_filelock_unlock, lock)
}

#' @export

print.filelock_lock <- function(x, ...) {
  unlocked <- .Call(c_filelock_is_unlocked, x)
  cat(
    if (unlocked) "Unlocked lock on " else "Lock on ",
    sQuote(x[[2]]), "\n",
    sep = ""
  )
  invisible(x)
}