files.md

id	title
files	File Channel

An AsynchronousFileChannel provides an API for handling files in a non-blocking way.

Required imports for presented snippets:

import zio._
import zio.nio.channels._
import zio.nio.file._
import zio.console._

Basic operations

Opening a file for a given path (with no additional open attributes) returns a ZManaged instance on which we're running the intended operations. ZManaged makes sure that the channel gets closed afterwards:

import java.nio.file.StandardOpenOption

val path = Path("file.txt")
val channelM = AsynchronousFileChannel.open(
  path, 
  StandardOpenOption.READ,
  StandardOpenOption.WRITE
).use { channel =>
  readWriteOp(channel) *> lockOp(channel)
}

Reading and writing is performed as effects where raw Byte content is wrapped in Chunk:

val readWriteOp = (channel: AsynchronousFileChannel) =>
  for {
    chunk <- channel.readChunk(20, 0L)
    text  = chunk.map(_.toChar).mkString
    _     <- putStrLn(text)
  
    input = Chunk.fromArray("message".toArray.map(_.toByte))
    _     <- channel.writeChunk(input, 0L)
  } yield ()

Contrary to previous operations, file locks are performed with the core java.nio.channels.FileLock class so they are not in effects. Apart from basic acquire/release actions, the core API offers, among other things, partial locks and overlap checks:

val lockOp = (channel: AsynchronousFileChannel) =>
  for {
    isShared     <- channel.lock().bracket(_.release.ignore)(l => IO.succeed(l.isShared))
    _            <- putStrLn(isShared.toString)                                      // false

    managed      = Managed.make(channel.lock(position = 0, size = 10, shared = false))(_.release.ignore)
    isOverlaping <- managed.use(l => IO.succeed(l.overlaps(5, 20)))
    _            <- putStrLn(isOverlaping.toString)                                  // true
  } yield ()

Also it's worth mentioning that we are treating FileLock as a resource here. For demonstration purposes we handled it in two different ways: using bracket and creating Managed for this.