Hi everybody,

I'm wondering if anyone knows if File.Exists check is reliable to process a file? We have a situation when we get an error attempting to read a big file which is not yet fully written. Windows Explorer shows file creation date as one time and then about 30 seconds later shows last modified date and the error occurs in between these 2 times, e.g.

Filename	Created	Error	Modified
File1.TXT	1:45:05	1:45:23	1:45:35
File2.TXT	1:44:46	1:45:23	1:45:58
File3.TXT	1:45:18	1:45:23	1:45:27
File4.TXT	1:45:20	1:45:23	1:45:27

I'm wondering if the code like this (right now is using some hard-coded numbers, but I'm changing it to database settings as well) going to be sufficient to fix the problem:

internal bool FileIsReadyToProcess(string fullPathFileName)
        {           
            int waitForFileToCopy = 500; // wait 0.5 second
            int iCount = 0;
            bool isValid = false;
            do
            {
                isValid = File.Exists(fullPathFileName);
                if (!isValid) Thread.Sleep(waitForFileToCopy);
            } while (!isValid && iCount++ < 10);
            return isValid;
        }