Writing to and reading from a file at the same time - c++

Question

I have two processes. One writes to a file, one has to read from it (At the same time..). So there's two fstreams open at a given time for the file (Although they may be in different processes).
I wrote a simple test function to crudely implement the sort of functionality I need:
void test_file_access()
{
try {
std::string file_name = "/Users/xxxx/temp_test_folder/test_file.dat";
std::ofstream out(file_name,
std::ios_base::out | std::ios_base::app | std::ios_base::binary);
out.write("Hello\n", 7);
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::seconds(1));
std::array<char, 4096> read_buf;
std::ifstream in(file_name,
std::ios_base::in | std::ios_base::binary);
if (in.fail()) {
std::cout << "Error reading file" << std::endl;
return;
}
in.exceptions(std::ifstream::failbit | std::ifstream::badbit);
//Exception at the below line.
in.read(read_buf.data(), read_buf.size());
auto last_read_size = in.gcount();
auto offset = in.tellg();
std::cout << "Read [" << read_buf.data() << "] from file. read_size = " << last_read_size
<< ", offset = " << offset << std::endl;
out.write("World\n", 7);
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::seconds(1));
//Do this so I can continue from the position I was before?
//in.clear();
in.read(read_buf.data(), read_buf.size());
last_read_size = in.gcount();
offset = in.tellg();
std::cout << "Read [" << read_buf.data() << "] from file. read_size = " << last_read_size
<< ", offset = " << offset << std::endl;
//Remove if you don't have boost.
boost::filesystem::remove(file_name);
}
catch(std::ios_base::failure const & ex)
{
std::cout << "Error : " << ex.what() << std::endl;
std::cout << "System error : " << strerror(errno) << std::endl;
}
}
int main()
{
test_file_access();
}
Run, and the output is like this:
Error : ios_base::clear: unspecified iostream_category error
System error : Operation timed out
So two questions,
What is going wrong here? Why do I get an Operation timed out error?
Is this an incorrect attempt to do what I need to get done? If so, what are the problems here?

Answer 1

You write into this file 7 bytes, but then try to read 4096 bytes. So in stream will read only 7 bytes and throw an exception as requested. Note that if you catch this exception the rest of the code will be executed correctly, e.g. last_read_size will be 7 and you can access those 7 bytes in buffer.