On Jun 26, 2007, at 5:33 AM, Lucio De Re wrote:

> What if there is something critical in the proplib that has not been
> saved and so you can't reboot?

Geez.

proplib is a library that applications use to manage containerized  
data inside collections (dictionaries and arrays).  It has a mechanism  
to externalize that data so that it can be passed across a protection  
boundary to another application and internalized again.

That externalized form can be written to a file.

That file is just like any other file.

So, how is a corrupted property list file any different than any other  
corrupted file?

Answer: it's not.

Furthermore, proplib's externalize-to-file routine performs an atomic  
update of the file to ensure that a reader never sees intermediate  
contents of the property list... either the old or the new, so the  
changes of having some catastrophic inconsistency are greatly reduced.

-- thorpej