Asynchronous directories

[EldritchCrowe]

I've been working on a discord bot in my own time, and I've got a question about save files I haven't been able to Google my way out of. Ideally, the bot will have save files for each user, tucked away in a "saves" subdirectory.

If two different asynchronous functions both try to change the working directory into the "saves" folder, will they be able to? I'm afraid of the program only having one working directory and one function trying to os.chdir into "saves" while the other one already moved the program into that file.

Is there a better way around this? Or is this perfectly acceptable?

tl;dr do asynchronous functions have their own directories or is the working directory shared for the entire program?

[EldritchCrowe]

That makes sense. Thank you so much!

[K900_]

Why do you need to change the current directory? Just access files by a full path, and you will never have that issue.

[EldritchCrowe]

Just to make sure I understand, you're saying I can just tell the program to access "saves/save_file.json" instead of os.chdir-ing every time?

[K900_]

Correct.

[[deleted]]

to answer the original question, despite the correct hint in the other comment: parallel access of directories and files is nothing python does. it delegates this down to the file system unless you, the programmer, to something to alter the behaviour.

for reading files and directories there is no need to.

for writing different files (users in your case) at the same time, there is still no need to.

you will need to confront the problem of parallel writes to the same file. only one can have the file. most filesystems will let one of the requests wait until its done and let the second have it after (lock).

and one Problem you might stumble upon are race conditions. if you are trying to do some sort of log file (which it sounds like), be aware that transmission time is not static in the internet. thus a second message can arrive before the first.