How can I tell if a file has finished copying?

[MartyBartfast]

Hi folks,

Ive got a file being copied onto a server (via ftp or scp), when it arrives I need to copy it onto somewhere else.

is there a neat/simple way for me to know for sure that the file has arrived in it's entirity before I try and copy it on?

I could do md5sum $file; sleep 2s ; md5sum $file and compare the two sums to know that it's not still being written but that seems a bit messy to me.

Any other thoughts?

[nelz]

lsof will tell you if the copy process still has a lock on the file. Or you could use the wait command to check when the process has completed.