PF>
  >                                               you have the
  > same issues, but you don't have to use file locking as the
  > solution. File locking is very mid 80's garbage,  and bogs
  > networks (and servers) down.
PF>

It depends from how it is used.  File locking from multiple workstations
all accessing the same file directly is very expensive in terms of LAN
traffic, especially if the LAN is resonably robust and able to cope with
loss of connection.

But the situation that we are discussing shouldn't result in any LAN
traffic since all of the contending threads are part of a process running
on the server itself, and all file access is local.

PF>
  > Designing a bbs message system (short of using a separate
  > file for each message) is pretty difficult;  there are more
  > difficult issues to deal with than multi-user access (free
  > space allocation and reclamation are pretty darn hard!).
PF>

As I said a couple of messages ago, unlike DOS and FAT, with OS/2 and HPFS
it's quite easy to adopt the UNIX philosophy of letting the filesystem
handle such things, and go with a one-file-per-message scheme.

  > JdeBP <
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