Dear Aunt TUAW,
With Lion, I'm seeing a lot of plist.lockfile in my Preferences folder. I'm assuming the "lockfile" business has to do with the new autosave stuff in Lion, but why would that apply to a preference file? Is this a bug or a feature?
Your loving nephew,
Darren
Dear Darren,
Feature.
Historically, lock files have restricted file access to one application at a time. Auntie has no reason to think that Lion's use of this concept differs. A lock file prevents a second edit from being applied concurrently, preserving information integrity.
Access control is especially important when competing processes might want
