Again, thank you for many postings to my question. I have reviewed solutions provided. Well, I like the named Mutex solution under Windows. That is a clean and straight-forward approach to the challenge. (I cannot believe that I'm saying good thing about Windows ;-) )
Unfortunately, I'm living in Unix realm ;-) None of solutions for Unix are appealing to me. But they must be "the" solution for the challenge as well-established software uses those solutions. Now, I'm wondering. As my program is a GUI (Tkinter) software. Is it possible to set a known value to X11 or Tk property through Tkinter so that another instance of the program can check if such property is set? Of course, I know this scheme has a flaw. If one instance uses another logical display, then such property is probably not shared. But for my usage, it is logically possible but not likely. I checked my Tkinter book and found the following function. winfo_interps(displayof=0) This returns a list of all Tk-based applications currently running on the display. When I tried, I got the following: >>> root.winfo_interps() ('tk #3', 'tk #2', 'tk') But I couldn't find a way to set a specific name to the Tcl interpreter. As I'm not an expert of Tcl/Tk and X11, I probably overlooked other functions that may do what I need. Any comments, suggestions on this? Maybe this can provide a platform independent way to ensure that only single instance is running. Thank you for your attention. Best reagrds, Aki Niimura -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list