Java: opening and reading from a file without locking it.

Question

I need to be able to mimic 'tail -f' with Java. I'm trying to read a log file as it's being written by another process, but when I open the file to read it, it locks the file and the other process can't write to it anymore. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Here is the code that I'm using currently:

public void read(){
    Scanner fp = null;
    try{
        fp = new Scanner(new FileReader(this.filename));
        fp.useDelimiter("\n");
    }catch(java.io.FileNotFoundException e){
        System.out.println("java.io.FileNotFoundException e");
    }
    while(true){
        if(fp.hasNext()){
            this.parse(fp.next());
        }           
    }       
}

Answer 1

Look at the FileChannel API here. For locking the file you can check here