Re: A few questions about desktop.el

["Stuart D. Herring" <herring@lanl.gov>]

> I think it is somewhat dangerous to modify the file when reading it.
> My experience tells me that that can lead to various problems in weird
> cases, and it is much better if operations that only look at data
> are written so that they do not change anything.
>
> Can you use a different file name for the "in use" marker?

I'm curious about your experience/worries -- the file is opened twice, so
there's no seek issues, and the write is just an append.  There's obvious
race conditions, but I don't think they're important (as I said
previously).  And I was trying to avoid introducing another file for which
one would have to check for conflicts and such.  But I suppose there's no
harm in having `desktop-lock-file-name', customizable but defaulted to
".emacs.desktop.lock" or so.  It can hold the PID of the owner Emacs
process.  Speaking of which, is there a way to see from Lisp if an
unrelated PID is running?

Davis

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