Jason Friedman wrote at 2021-4-18 07:46 -0600: > ... >I have a program that runs via crontab every five minutes. It polls a >Box.com folder for files and, if any are found, it copies them locally and >performs a computation on them that can exceed five minutes. It pushes the >results back up to Box. (Box.com ensures that only complete files are >visible when I poll.) Files are dropped into this Box.com folder rarely, >but to ensure a good customer experience I do not want to set my crontab to >run less frequently. My hardware cannot support multiple simultaneous >computations.
Programs typically use some form of file locking to detect attempts to run the same program multiple times. The optimal form of locking depends on the operating system. Under *nix, so called advisory locks seem promising. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
