Question

My goal is to know if a file is locked by another process or not, even if I don’t have access to that file!

So to be more clear, let’s say I’m opening the file using python’s built-in open() with 'wb' switch (for writing). open() will throw IOError with errno 13 (EACCES) if:

1. the user does not have permission to the file or
2. the file is locked by another process

How can I detect case (2) here?

(My target platform is Windows)

Answer 1

You can use os.access for checking your access permission. If access permissions are good, then it has to be the second case.