check if a file is open in Python

Question

In my app  I write to an excel file  After writing  the user is able to view the file by opening it  But if the user forgets to close the file before any further writing  a warning message should appear  So I need a way to check this file is open before the writing process  Could you supply me with some python code to do this task

User · Answer

If all you care about is the current process  an easy way is to use the file object attribute  closed   f   open  file py   if f closed    print  file is closed    This will not detect if the file is open by other processes   source  http   docs python org 2 4 lib bltin-file-objects html

User · Answer

Using   try  with open  path    r   as file  or just open   may cause some troubles when file is opened by some other processes  i e  user opened it manually   You can solve your poblem using win32com library   Below code checks if any excel files are opened and if none of them matches the name of your particular one  openes a new one   import win32com client as win32 xl   win32 gencache EnsureDispatch  Excel Application    my workbook    wb name xls  xlPath  my wb path      my workbook   if xl Workbooks Count  gt  0        if none of opened workbooks matches the name  openes my workbook      if not any i Name    my workbook for i in xl Workbooks            xl Workbooks Open Filename xlPath          xl Visible   True  no workbooks found  opening else        xl Workbooks Open Filename xlPath      xl Visible   True   xl Visible   True is not necessary  used just for convenience    Hope this will help

User · Answer

I assume that you re writing to the file  then close it  so the user can open it in Excel   and then  before re-opening it for append write operations  you want to check that the file isn t still open in Excel  This is how you could do that  while True      repeat until the try statement succeeds     try          myfile   open  quot myfile csv quot    quot r  quot     or  quot a  quot   whatever you need         break                               exit the loop     except IOError          input  quot Could not open file  Please close Excel  Press Enter to retry  quot             restart the loop  with myfile      do stuff

User · Answer

You could use with open  quot path quot   as file  so that it automatically closes  else if it s open in another process you can maybe try as in Tims example you should use except IOError to not ignore any other problem with your code    try     with open  quot path quot    quot r quot   as file    or just open          Code here except IOError       raise error or print

User · Answer

None of the other provided examples would work for me when dealing with this specific issue with excel on windows 10   The only other option I could think of was to try and rename the file or directory containing the file temporarily  then rename it back   import os  try       os rename  file xls    tempfile xls       os rename  tempfile xls    file xls   except OSError      print  File is still open

User · Answer

if myfile closed    False     print  quot File is still open                  quot

[python] check if a file is open in Python

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