Does the Python “open” function save its content in memory or in a temp file?

Question

For the following Python code:

fp = open(\'output.txt\', \'wb\')
# Very big file, writes a lot of lines, n is a very large number
for i in range(1, n):
    f         


        

Answer 1

If you a writing out a large file for which the writes might fail you a better off flushing the file to disk yourself at regular intervals using fp.flush(). This way the file will be in a location of your choosing that you can easily get to rather than being at the mercy of the OS:

fp = open('output.txt', 'wb')
counter = 0
for line in many_lines:
    file.write(line)
    counter += 1
    if counter > 999:
        fp.flush()
fp.close()

This will flush the file to disk every 1000 lines.