8.10 Built-in Module fcntl

   

This module performs file control and I/O control on file descriptors. It is an interface to the fcntl() and ioctl() Unix routines. File descriptors can be obtained with the fileno() method of a file or socket object.

The module defines the following functions:

fcntl (fd, op[, arg])

Perform the requested operation on file descriptor fd. The operation is defined by op and is operating system dependent. Typically these codes can be retrieved from the library module FCNTL . The argument arg is optional, and defaults to the integer value 0. When present, it can either be an integer value, or a string. With the argument missing or an integer value, the return value of this function is the integer return value of the C fcntl() call. When the argument is a string it represents a binary structure, e.g. created by struct.pack(). The binary data is copied to a buffer whose address is passed to the C fcntl() call. The return value after a successful call is the contents of the buffer, converted to a string object. In case the fcntl() fails, an IOError is raised.

ioctl (fd, op, arg)

This function is identical to the fcntl() function, except that the operations are typically defined in the library module IOCTL.

flock (fd, op)

Perform the lock operation op on file descriptor fd. See the Unix manual flock(3) for details. (On some systems, this function is emulated using fcntl().)

lockf (fd, code, [len, [start, [whence]]])

This is a wrapper around the FCNTL.F_SETLK and FCNTL.F_SETLKW fcntl() calls. See the Unix manual for details.

If the library modules FCNTL  or IOCTL  are missing, you can find the opcodes in the C include files <sys/fcntl.h> and <sys/ioctl.h>. You can create the modules yourself with the h2py script, found in the "Tools/scripts/" directory.

Examples (all on a SVR4 compliant system):

import struct, FCNTL

file = open(...)
rv = fcntl(file.fileno(), FCNTL.O_NDELAY, 1)

lockdata = struct.pack('hhllhh', FCNTL.F_WRLCK, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
rv = fcntl(file.fileno(), FCNTL.F_SETLKW, lockdata)

Note that in the first example the return value variable rv will hold an integer value; in the second example it will hold a string value. The structure lay-out for the lockdata variable is system dependent -- therefore using the flock() call may be better.