Read a file using a program like Notepad while the file is being written to by another program?

Question

Read a file using a program like Notepad while the file is being written to by another program?

I've created a Windows Service application that logs continuously.

I want to inspect the current events of the service without closing it. To do this I open the log.txt in Notepad , but gets the message

The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process

How can I read the log file without closing the service? After the service is closed, I can readily inspect every log entry in the file.

The file is being written by calls to fopen_s and fprintf , if that should be of any interest. Also, the service is programmed in C/C++ on Windows 10 64-bit , running under SCM with default priviledges ie LocalSystem .

Answer 1

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z5hh6ee9.aspx and then Remarks:

Files that are opened by fopen_s and _wfopen_s are not sharable. If you require that a file be sharable, use _fsopen, _wfsopen with the appropriate sharing mode constant—for example, _SH_DENYNO for read/write sharing.

Would that be a solution?