Hot-Handling of MyISAM files

I (not me, J Jorgenson via stackoverflow.com) found the following will ensure integrity of MyISAM tables for any file-level manipulation:

LOCK TABLE x WRITE; 

FLUSH TABLE x; -- closes all file handles into table by mysql.

Now you can perform file-level manipulations.

FLUSH TABLE x; -- A 'stat' of the table occurs and info-schema is updated appropriately. 

UNLOCK TABLES; 

If you do NOT lock-write your table, mysql may access it (reads or writes) while you are doing your file-level copy/manipulation. This is also the same mechanism used to allow 'myisampack', 'myisamchk' for tables on an HOT database that even has external locking disabled, without worries of corruption.