How do I flush a file in Perl?

Solution 1:

Try:

use IO::Handle;
$fh->autoflush;

This was actually posted as a way of auto-flushing in an early question of mine, which asked about the universally accepted bad way of achieving this :-)

Solution 2:

TL/DR: use IO::Handle and the flush method, eg:

use IO::Handle;
$myfile->flush();

First, you need to decide how "flushed" you want it. There can be quite a few layers of buffering:

• Perl's internal buffer on the file handle. Other programs can't see data until it's left this buffer.

• File-system level buffering of "dirty" file blocks. Other programs can still see these changes, they seem "written", but they'll be lost if the OS or machine crashes.

• Disk-level write-back buffering of writes. The OS thinks these are written to disk, but the disk is actually just storing them in volatile memory on the drive. If the OS crashes the data won't be lost, but if power fails it might be unless the disk can write it out first. This is a big problem with cheap consumer SSDs.

It gets even more complicated when SANs, remote file systems, RAID controllers, etc get involved. If you're writing via pipes there's also the pipe buffer to consider.

If you just want to flush the Perl buffer, you can close the file, print a string containing "\n" (since it appears that Perl flushes on newlines), or use IO::Handle's flush method.

You can also, per the perl faq use binmode or play with $| to make the file handle unbuffered. This is not the same thing as flushing a buffered handle, since queuing up a bunch of buffered writes then doing a single flush has a much lower performance cost than writing to an unbuffered handle.

If you want to flush the file system write back buffer you need to use a system call like fsync(), open your file in O_DATASYNC mode, or use one of the numerous other options. It's painfully complicated, as evidenced by the fact that PostgreSQL has its own tool just to test file syncing methods.

If you want to make sure it's really, truly, honestly on the hard drive in permanent storage you must flush it to the file system in your program. You also need to configure the hard drive/SSD/RAID controller/SAN/whatever to really flush when the OS asks it to. This can be surprisingly complicated to do and is quite OS/hardware specific. "plug-pull" testing is strongly recommended to make sure you've really got it right.

Solution 3:

From 'man perlfaq5':

$old_fh = select(OUTPUT_HANDLE);
$| = 1;
select($old_fh);

If you just want to flush stdout, you can probably just do:

$| = 1;

But check the FAQ for details on a module that gives you a nicer-to-use abstraction, like IO::Handle.

Solution 4:

Here's the answer - the real answer.

Stop maintaining an open file handle for this file for the life of the process.

Start abstracting your file-append operation into a sub that opens the file in append mode, writes to it, and closes it.

# Appends a new line to the existing file
sub append_new_line{
    my $linedata = shift;
    open my $fh, '>>', $fnm or die $!; # $fnm is file-lexical or something
    print $fh $linedata,"\n"; # Flavor to taste
    close $fh;
}

The process observing the file will encounter a closed file that gets modified whenever the function is called.