On 2/25/2013 8:02 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote: >> Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:03:13 -0800 >> From: Paul Eggert >> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org >> >> One other thought. Part of the reason GNU/POSIXish hosts use >> symbolic links is that readlink, symlink and unlink >> are atomic operations. They let Emacs atomically create >> a lock, test whether a lock exists, and remove a lock. This >> doesn't seem to be true of the new MS-Windows implementation, >> which uses open+write+close to create a lock and open+read+close >> to test whether a lock exists, neither of which is atomic. >> Is there some way this can be done atomically on MS-Windows? > > Why is that important? On Windows, as long as a file is open, no > other application can write to it or remove the file. Is that the > "atomic" nature you wanted? > >> Are readlink, symlink, and unlink atomic on MS-Windows? > > Please define "atomic" for these cases, and I will think about that. If we really need atomicity under Windows, Transactional NTFS will work for more users than symbolic links will.