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Hi all,
First of all let me state that im coding on a windows XP platform. I have a function that called logs that writes the state of my program to c:/log.txt, however I want this function to be mutally exclusive so it can only be wrote by one thread at a time. Do you recommend using semaphores or protecting the log function? Also what headers would I hafe to include to achieve this (remembering its for windows)?
Thanks a lot
usually a CRITICAL_SECTION is fine for this.
for windows windows.h covers most things. make sure you use a multithreaded version of the runtime.
Assuming you only have one program withg multiple threads that need to write to the file, a critical section is fine (and has lower overhead than other schemes, such as semaphores and mutexes).
If you have multiple programs running (or multiple instances of the same program), the technique will be to open the file for exclusive access when you need to write to it, append whatever you wish to the end, and then close it. This technique will also work with multiple threads in a program, but involves more overhead than simply keeping the file open for writing continually. It is probably applicable if writing to the log file does not occur too often and does not take too long.