http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=291634

oylee has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a perl script that runs on a cron job that periodically polls a directory. If the directory contains any files, it decrypts those files and moves them to another directory. The problem, however, is that those files are getting placed there by some other FTP process over which I have no control. This means that occasionally, my script will try to process a file that is in the process of being transferred. Is there any 'natural' perl way to prevent this? I've poked around the File module list on CPAN but didn't see anything immediately relevant, but my eyes are pretty small. We've already looked into using fuser and File::stat (we could stat() the file and then compare it's mtime with the current time and if it's less than a certain threshold, don't process it). We can certainly go with either of these solutions but they don't feel perlfect...

Thanks for your help!
Allen