How can PHP developers avoid race conditions when writing to files?

Race conditions when writing to files can be avoided by using file locking mechanisms. PHP provides functions like `flock()` to lock files before writing to them, preventing multiple processes from writing to the same file simultaneously. By implementing file locking, PHP developers can ensure that only one process can write to a file at a time, thus avoiding race conditions. 

$fp = fopen("example.txt", "a");
if (flock($fp, LOCK_EX)) {
    fwrite($fp, "Writing to file\n");
    flock($fp, LOCK_UN);
} else {
    echo "Couldn't get the lock!";
}
fclose($fp);

Keywords

PHP race conditions file writing file locking concurrency

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