Re: [Chicken-users] Portably overwriting files

[Thomas Christian Chust]

Matt Gushee schrieb:

> [...] it appears that for all the R5RS I/O procedures, the behavior
> is unspecified whenever you open an output port on an existing file. 
> So, do I need to explicitly delete the existing file in order to
> have portable code?

Hello,

the best solution would probably be to:

 - Write the new data to a new file in the same directory as the old
   one. The name of the new file could be randomly generated.

 - Replace the old file by renaming the new one to the old name.

As the rename operation between files in the same directory is usually 
atomic, this has the advantage of having transactional semantics.

cu,
Thomas