flock() semantics?

From: Shaun Fryer (sfryer_at_sourcery.ca)
Date: 10/30/03 

Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 23:47:04 -0500
To: Perl Beginners <beginners@perl.org>

Hi all,

I'm writing an app which uses a flat file to store a
*short* list of simple key/value pairs. However having
read the flock() man page, I'm unsure about whether I
need to seek() in cases where I'm not merely appending
to the file (such as when deleting a record).

sub Delete_Record {
    my ($file, $key, $value, @array) = @_;
    open(OUT, ">$file");
    flock(OUT, LOCK_EX);

    seek(OUT, 0, 0); # Should I do this?

    foreach (@array) { # FYI: $/ = "\n"

        seek(OUT, 0, 2); # Or perhaps this?

        print OUT $_ unless ( m/^$key\s+$value$/ );
    }
    flock(OUT, LOCK_UN);
    close(OUT);
}

Btw, the above code is just to illustrate the question,
thus no error checking and so forth. 

-- 
=====================
 Shaun Fryer
=====================
 http://sourcery.ca/
 ph: 905-529-0591
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Science is like sex: occasionally something useful
comes out of it, but that's not why we do it.
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