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Read from a busy file

Title: Read from a busy file Question: There are some applications not very friendly with file sharing. How can I read data from such a file without causing any troubles to the other application? Answer: Even when openning your file with the lowest privileges (using ReadOnly, ShareReadWrite) sometimes opening an already open file can be a hard work to do, specially if the file is highly active (constant reading and writing from the other app). A very simple and elegant solution is to use a MemoryStream instead of accesing the file directly: var Memory : TMemoryStream; begin Memory := TMemoryStream.Create; try Memory.LoadFromFile('busyfile.dat'); // that's it!! .. Memory.Read(...); // and you can use read methods just like in files Memory.Seek(...); FileSize := Memory.Size; .. finally Memory.Free; end; end; This way you never open the file, but make a copy of it in Memory. Of course you can also write to the Stream in Memory, but the changes won't be reflected in disc until you save it to a file (with SaveToFile). Juan Antonio Navarro - tres1416