"Failing if the file already exists" is exactly the behavior I want. I don't want "exclusive access". Would it help if they renamed it "SQLITE_FAIL_IF_EXISTS"? I mean, I know they named it after the POSIX "O_EXCL" flag, but I always thought *that* flag was weirdly named to begin with. I appreciate the workaround, but I'm developing on Linux for a program that's eventually going to be multi-platform, so a Windows-only solution wouldn't work for me. I did find a [better workaround](https://mijailovic.net/2017/08/27/sqlite-adventures/) (from back in 2017, so this bug has obviously been around for a while), but that involves modifying the VFS, and you have to maintain a separate state variable to change whether you want exclusive mode or not. It would be **so** much simpler if the developers would just stop filtering that particular flag out of the flags parameter.