Risk of corrupting open sources files

[Matt McCutchen]

On Thu, 2010-04-15 at 17:41 -0700, Mohammed AlQuraishi wrote:
> I have a situation where the files I'm backing up are written to every
> fifteen minutes or so. There's a good possibility that rsync will try
> to copy a file while it is being written into, and I'm wondering if
> there's any risk that the _source_ file will be damaged? I've seen
> similar posts about the target file, but my concern is the source.

I've never heard of a file being damaged by reading it.

> Additionally, would the writing program be blocked from writing to the
> file if rsync is reading the file?

Not on unix-like systems.  OTOH, I believe Windows enforces read/write
locking, so rsync could not have the file open for reading at the same
time as another process has it open for writing.

-- 
Matt