I have a small application that displays the contents of a log file, somewhat transmogrified for readability. As the log file gets rewritten occasionally and Windows file system semantics prohibit deletion of open files, I create a hardlink to the file.
Obviously, this needs to happen on the same file system as the original file -- at present, I create the harddisk in the same directory, which I believe can be reasonably assumed to fulfill this requirement; the result is that a temporary file shows up in the directory listing where the user just clicked to open the file, which is ugly.
Is there a way to create a hardlink so that it does not show up (the customer where the program is used has several junctions in their directory tree, so it cannot be assumed that a specific directory is on the same filesystem), or is there a better method to read a file that another process may want to delete and rewrite (e.g. by catching their access and closing the file before letting the other process's access go through), so the program can be used on archived (readonly) log files without modification?
