File Locking
Hello!
I think that perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to just use the
procmail `lockfile' program to dot locking. It can be called from 'C'
with either `system' or `fork'/`exec*', and works well from scripts as
well. That's a quick and lazy way out.
Or, we could write our own small utility for doing this, adding that
the lock file should contain, like a UUCP locking semiphore file, the
PID of the process holding the lock, as well as the UUID
(see:`man sysid') of the machine that process is running on...
Programs seeing the lockfile that are running on other OS's may not
know to look inside the file for that information, therefore I think
that the lockfile thus produced needs to be touched every so often, so
that it does not become stale.
I will try and start work on such a utility this week, after I've
looked over several more locking programs' source code, and read what
I can get ahold of on the subject.
`movemail', `lockfile', `maillock' (where can I find that?),
`newslock' `qpopper', `sendmail', `libuuid', `sysid',... anything
else I should read?
--
Karl M. Hegbloom <karlheg@inetarena.com> finger or ytalk:
http://www.inetarena.com/~karlheg karlheg@bittersweet.inetarena.com
Portland, OR USA
Debian GNU 1.3 Linux 2.1.36 AMD K5 PR-133
PS:
It occurs to me that there should be a way for a file being
edited in an emacs to be locked this way also. It's standard
locking mechanism works well, but only between emacsen. There's
a package called `backup-dir', that makes it so '~' backups get
put in a subdirectory, rather than in the directory you're
standing in. It only does that inside certain directories that
you've configured it to do that in. ("/etc/cron.*") I think a
thing like it could be done with an extension that will create
and honor .lock files. This may have occasional usefulness???
--
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