nio - Why FileChannel in Java is not non-blocking?

Question

I wanted to write a program which writes to multiple files simultaneously; thought it will be possible with one thread by using non-blocking mode. But FileChannel does not support non-blocking mode. Does anybody know why?

Answer 1

UNIX does not support non-blocking I/O for files, see Non-blocking I/O with regular files. As Java should (at least try to) provide the same behaviour on all platforms, the FileChannel does not implement SelectableChannel.

However Java 7 will include a new AsynchronousFileChannel class that supports asynchronous file I/O, which is a different mechanism to non-blocking I/O.

In general only sockets and pipes truly support non-blocking I/O via select() mechanism.