--- Dave Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I started off with what I thought was a simple
> question, but googling,
> searching mailing list archives, reading man pages,
> and testing hasn't
> turned up anything I'm happy with and has raised
> some new issues...
>
> In a past life, on a non-Unix system, I was able to
> set up simple and
> effective mutual exclusion in the equivalent of
> shell scripts by
> opening a file for write access (which created an
> exclusive lock on the
> file) at the start of the protected section and not
> closing it until
> the end of that section. This had no race
> conditions and had no
> problem of stale locks since the lock was
> automatically released if the
> process holding it terminated abnormally.
>
> My original question was "What is the equivalent
> idiom for OpenBSD
> shell scripts, or is there none?"
>
> The best approximation I've found so far is
> (assuming that the details
> of the semantics of "ln" and "kill -0" under
> OpenBSD's /bin/sh are as
> the author expects; I haven't yet checked this)
>
> function my_lockfile ()
> {
> TEMPFILE="$1.$$"
> LOCKFILE="$1.lock"
> { echo $$ > $TEMPFILE } >& /dev/null || {
> echo "You don't have permission to
> access `dirname
> $TEMPFILE`"
> return 1
> }
> ln $TEMPFILE $LOCKFILE >& /dev/null && {
> rm -f $TEMPFILE
> return 0
> }
> kill -0 `cat $LOCKFILE` >& /dev/null && {
> rm -f $TEMPFILE
> return 1
> }
> echo "Removing stale lock file"
> rm -f $LOCKFILE
> ln $TEMPFILE $LOCKFILE >& /dev/null && {
> rm -f $TEMPFILE
> return 0
> }
> rm -f $TEMPFILE
> return 1
>
> but this is more complicated than I like and has the
> intrinsic problem
> that one can't be sure of detecting a stale lock
> file (the process
> creating the lock file may have died and a new
> process with the same
> process id been created; this seems rather unlikely
> in practice but
> AFAIK is definitely possible).
>
> It also, at least under OpenBSD, has the serious
> problem that "$$"
> isn't the PID of the shell running the script but
> rather the PID of the
> "original" shell (whatever exactly that means; some
> testing suggests
> that it's the last process on the PPID chain which
> is still in this
> process group) and I haven't yet found any
> straightforward way of
> getting the PID of the "bottom-level" shell, which
> is what is needed
> for the stale-lock testing to work at all when the
> exclusion needed is
> among scripts run in subshells of the same shell.
> (I realize that I
> could create a trivial program which writes its PPID
> to stdout, or hack
> /bin/sh to add a new variable which contains the PID
> I want -- but I'd
> prefer to use the tools which come as part of the
> base system. This
> has also left me rather curious as to *why* the PID
> and PPID of the
> "original" shell are easily accessible in scripts
> but those of the
> subshell actually running the script aren't.)
>
> Another obvious possibility is to use something
> other than a shell
> script (probably perl, which I strongly suspect is
> capable of doing
> this), but I'm not at all sure it makes sense to
> stop and learn yet
> another language *right* *now*. If this *is* the
> way to go,
> recommendations as to the "best" language for
> general sysadmin-type
> scripting would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks in advance for any advice,
>
> Dave
>
> --
> Dave Anderson
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>
look at lockfile command from procmail package.
Or write a small lock command in C and put it into
/usr/local/bin ;)
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