How do filesystems handle concurrent read/write?
User A asks the system to read file foo and at the same time user B wants to save his or her data onto the same file. How is this situation handled on the filesystem level?
Answer
Most filesystems (but not all) use locking to guard concurrent access to the same file. The lock can be exclusive, so the first user to get the lock gets access - subsequent users get a "access denied" error. In your example scenario, user A will be able to read the file and gets the file lock, but user B will not be able to write while user A is reading.
Some filesystems (e.g. NTFS) allow the level of locking to be specified, to allow for example concurrent readers, but no writers. Byte-range locks are also possible.
Unlike databases, filesystems typically are not transactional, not atomic and changes from different users are not isolated (if changes can even be seen - locking may prohibit this.)
Using whole-file locks is a coarse grained approach, but it will guard against inconsistent updates. Not all filesystems support whole-file locks, and so it is common practice to use a lock file - a typically empty file whose presence indicates that its associated file is in use. (Creating a file is an atomic operation on most file systems.)