CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#multithreadingfile
Breeze
Breeze

Reputation: 2058

Is it thread-safe to copy a file to different destinations with one thread each

I need to load the content of a file on different computers at the same time. Because a StreamReader will occupy the file, I want to copy it to a temporary folder before opening it. (The title is more general as there should be no difference between two threads running on one computer and two computers running one thread each.)

Question: will two threads copying a file at the same time affect each other even when the copy destinations are separated?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 423

Answers (3)

StepUp
StepUp

Reputation: 38199

Your operation is reading. It is like reading a book by 2 person simultaneously. So it is thread safe.

However, if you write some note to the file by two threads - it is not thread safe. It is like two person writing some notes in one copybook. They will just disturb each other and letters will be not correct and the meaning will be incorrect.

Upvotes: 1

Luaan
Luaan

Reputation: 63772

Don't - it's much easier to just use the correct arguments when creating your file stream.

The key is the FileShare setting - it says what kinds of operations are allowed on the file you have opened. Specify FileShare.Read, and any number of concurrent read operations (that also have a FileShare.Read) on the same file will work just fine.

It's as simple as

File.Open(path, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read)

Upvotes: 2

Servy
Servy

Reputation: 203825

It's safe to read a file from multiple threads/processes/machines, as long as there is no one writing to the file at the same time.

Upvotes: 3

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