[tex-live] Update all installed failed

[Philipp Stephani]

Am 15.11.2010 um 18:41 schrieb Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd):

> 
> 
> Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 
> > Just an idea: if you try to open tex.exe in the append mode and it
> > succeeds, you know that the file is not used and you can overwrite it.
> > you can immediatelly close it without writing anything. It may be good
> > to set the ctime to the old value. If opening fails, it means that the
> > file is in use. I do not know whether such an approach works but it
> > looks simple.
> 
> Well, it is certainly simple, and it is probably sufficient in 99.999%
> of cases, but of course there is the theoretical possibility that
> someone/thing might start to make use of tex.exe between the time that
> you close it and the time you try to overwrite it.  I know next to
> nothing about Windows programming, but in a more sophisticated
> operating system such as VMS one would expect to have the ability
> to take out an exclusive lock on the file which one would not
> relinquish until the overwrite were complete.

Transactional file system operations have been available since Windows Vista, so that should be no problem in principle.