Handling write and read at the same time in java

Question

I have a thread which will be continuously logging into a file. I have a function getLines() which when called will return last 100 lines of the log file.

My question is whether implementing a simple BufferedReader inside getLines() is enough ? I'm mainly concerned whether reading is valid when a write is going on. I don't mind missing a few lines of code which was written during the process of read though.

Thanks

Answer 1

Since Java FileOutputStream / FileInputStream open files in shared mode reading will not interfere with writing. Though in my view it would be better and more efficient to implement a logger that holds last 100 written lines and returns them on demand.