Java: opening and reading from a file without locking it

Question

I need to be able to mimic \'tail -f\' with Java. I\'m trying to read a log file as it\'s being written by another process, but when I open the file to read it, it locks the

Answer 1

java.io gives you a mandatory file lock and java.nio gives you an advisory file lock

If you want to read any file without any lock you can use below classes

import java.nio.channels.FileChannel;
import java.nio.file.Paths;

If you want to tail a file line by line use below code for the same

public void tail(String logPath){
    String logStr = null;
    FileChannel fc = null;
    try {
        fc = FileChannel.open(Paths.get(logPath), StandardOpenOption.READ);
        fc.position(fc.size());
    } catch (FileNotFoundException e1) {
        System.out.println("FileNotFoundException occurred in Thread : " + Thread.currentThread().getName());
        return;
    } catch (IOException e) {
        System.out.println("IOException occurred while opening FileChannel in Thread : " + Thread.currentThread().getName());
    }
    while (true) {
        try {
            logStr = readLine(fc);
            if (logStr != null) {
                System.out.println(logStr);
            } else {
                Thread.sleep(1000);
            }
        } catch (IOException|InterruptedException e) {
            System.out.println("Exception occurred in Thread : " + Thread.currentThread().getName());
            try {
                fc.close();
            } catch (IOException e1) {
            }
            break;
        }
    }
}

private String readLine(FileChannel fc) throws IOException {
    ByteBuffer buffers = ByteBuffer.allocate(128);
    // Standard size of a line assumed to be 128 bytes
    long lastPos = fc.position();
    if (fc.read(buffers) > 0) {
        byte[] data = buffers.array();
        boolean foundTmpTerminator = false;
        boolean foundTerminator = false;
        long endPosition = 0;
        for (byte nextByte : data) {
            endPosition++;
            switch (nextByte) {
            case -1:
                foundTerminator = true;
                break;
            case (byte) '\r':
                foundTmpTerminator = true;
                break;
            case (byte) '\n':
                foundTmpTerminator = true;
                break;
            default:
                if (foundTmpTerminator) {
                    endPosition--;
                    foundTerminator = true;
                }
            }
            if (foundTerminator) {
                break;
            }
        }
        fc.position(lastPos + endPosition);
        if (foundTerminator) {
            return new String(data, 0, (int) endPosition);
        } else {
            return new String(data, 0, (int) endPosition) + readLine(fc);
        }
    }
    return null;
}