gjp1311 wrote: Was I really guilt in all of this? Should I have just ignored thier orders and didn't finish the task? No. You did exactly as you should have done here -- you warned them, you kept records, you showed the records when they tried to blame you for their mistake. Next time it happens, do all that again, but also talk to your boss before you perform the task that's going to break things. I live in Oregon, and I'm an engineer.

Member 7989122 wrote: I have fairly recently programmed a couple "try again" cases: On a quite heavily loaded file system, the number of exceptions due to confliciting accesses was higher than desired. So, when making modifications to a set of files, I make one try for each. Those failing are put into a list for retrying, and a second attempt is made once the first round was completed. Only after a second try, the user is notified. We went from too many access collisions to almost none. Sometimes, the second try came too fast, and the file was still busy. So I added a 5 ms sleep before starting a second round, and after that I haven't seen a single collision. So, you just assumed that whoever/whatever else had been writing to the file had been doing nothing worthwhile? Personally, if I detect any changes to a file I would avoid writing to it, and notify the user. Better still, open it for exclusive write. "If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.