Re: voting using text files

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 * and then Rasmus Lerdorf declared.... > I think you guys are making this way more complicated than it needs to be. > > In this case could I suggest that you make use of the fact that appends of > less than a blocksize are atomic. Therefore, why not simply append a > single character to a text file for each vote? If you are voting for a > list of things, assigning a character to each item and simply append 'a', > 'b', 'c' or 'd' to your file. The size of the file instantly > gives you > the number of votes cast. Reading the file and counting the number of > times each letter occurs using something like substr_count() will give you > the number of votes for each option. > > That gives you a lockless and flexible system without the risk of deadlock > or missing votes due to race conditions. Ladies and gentelman, I think we have a winner, a very simple solution Rasmus, and more than adequate for my needs. Shame though, all the other file locking stuff looked like fun ;) Thanks everyone! - -- Nick Wilson // www.explodingnet.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE86+WuHpvrrTa6L5oRAgWVAJwJ8vOtpNCUaXd6Qm/gdkB407KXsQCfRSBt mL4lkx5YnYMAeO+ViTh1mo8= =1ht8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----