Hello.

Please help me with the question:

I am getting files from a directory, then I have to process them one by one (copy, move to another folder, and etc.). Before I will do anything with a file I must check if the file is not involved in any process (suppose it is already open or loading from another folder). If the file is under any process it should me moved to the end of its current directory and the second file should be processed; if it is the last file - program should pause and start over when the file will be available to process (I mean someone close the file or the file will be loaded completely).

The code should run in an automatic cycle, without any interaction with a user.

If it is hard maybe somebody knows how to check the file status. Spent a lot of time but did not find any useful information.

Thank you.

Attempting to open the file for writing would probably qualify as a reasonable check that no-one else has a lock on it. You can then close it and continue with your process. If trying to open for writing throws an exception than either someone has a lock on it, or you don't have permissions for it. I don't know of a way to explicitly check for whether or not a file is in use. But then again, I'm not a System.IO expert so there's likely something I'm not aware of.

-Peter
compiledthoughts.com