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Impact of vim on a file being used by an other process

Time:12-28

I am using SLURM for my jobs on a computing cluster. I want to check my output file using vim in the login node when the job is running and will not do any editing. Will this have any impact on my SLURM job in progress?

CodePudding user response:

It shouldn't effect the current job.

Whenever two different programs open a file on Unix operating systems, the operating system creates different entries in the global file table. Since they have different context (like current position, mode, etc.) a reader won't interfere with a writer. You will likely just read partial information.

If you want a safeguard to prevent writing to the file, you can use vim -R file to open the file in read-only mode. You can also use tail -f to "follow" the file, writing output to the terminal as information is appended to the file.

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