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If two or more applications running on Windows are trying to append a folder name to the environment variable PATH at the same time, is it possible to get a race condition such that one of the values being appended is lost?
What is the standard way to avoid these race conditions?
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Race conditions can be avoided by proper thread synchronization in critical sections. Thread synchronization can be achieved using a synchronized block of Java code. Thread synchronization can also be achieved using other synchronization constructs like locks or atomic variables like java.
A race condition is an undesirable situation that occurs when a device or system attempts to perform two or more operations at the same time, but because of the nature of the device or system, the operations must be done in the proper sequence to be done correctly.
A race condition occurs when two or more threads can access shared data and they try to change it at the same time. Because the thread scheduling algorithm can swap between threads at any time, you don't know the order in which the threads will attempt to access the shared data.
It can be eliminated by using no more than two levels of gating. An essential race condition occurs when an input has two transitions in less than the total feedback propagation time. Sometimes they are cured using inductive delay line elements to effectively increase the time duration of an input signal.
No, there's no danger of this. Every process has its own environment. So they'll just update their own copy of the PATH environment variable. Such changes are also not persisted and disappear when the process terminates.
Making global changes to the environment requires writing the registry. Otherwise exposed in the System applet in Control Panel. Such changes require a logout + login to be effective for every process.
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