Hi, I've just written lock, a simple little script to ensure that two programs won't run at once. I am using this to ensure my users don't overwrite the same shared folder in a set of genomic analysis scripts. I thought it might be useful.
The script will either create the lock and exit, or ping the lock every two seconds until the lock is gone (via rmdir). I chose directories as lock because they are atomic on Linux, so that avoids some issue of locks overriding eachother. Usage is pretty simple, if you were to spawn this script twice, only one do_work would execute at a time. lock mylock do_work sleep 10 rmdir mylock This time I won't forget my link: https://github.com/mutantturkey/lock Cheers, Calvin
