Mutex shared lock while reading/writing files

Question

Hi,
My application is a single threaded application. And I am trying to do the read/write file operation.  But there is a chance that other process may read/write the same file while i am using. So before reading or writing the file, i want to mutex shared
lock.
So can please some one tell me how to prevent this situation. Is there some sample code. I checked in net, how to use mutex shared lock, i got some example, but every where before using the mutex loxk, a thread needs to be created. Since my application is
a single threaded, so i dont want to create a new thread.
So please help me, how to prevent/stop other process to access the same file while my application is using.
THanks a lot in advance.

Answer 1

That's not something that a mutex can help with. Other processes won't know about your mutex and even if they know that's overkill. Normally you simply open that file without allowing read/write sharing - in the case of CreateFile that in general means that
you pass 0 for the dwShareMode parameter.
If you use the C runtime functions then you can use fopen_s instead of fopen as it automatically disallows sharing if you open the file for write (if you open for read when it allows shared read which is the normal thing to do).