Anchor(faq45)

How can I ensure that only one instance of a script is running at a time (mutual exclusion)?

We need some means of mutual exclusion. One easy way is to use a "lock": any number of processes can try to acquire the lock simultaneously, but only one of them will succeed.

How can we implement this using shell scripts? Some people suggest creating a lock file, and checking for its presence:

This example does not work, because there is a time window between checking and creating the file. Assume two processes are running the code at the same time. Both check if the lockfile exists, and both get the result that it does not exist. Now both processes assume they have acquired the lock -- a disaster waiting to happen. We need an atomic check-and-create operation, and fortunately there is one: mkdir, the command to create a directory:

The advantage over using a lock file is, that even when two processes call mkdir at the same time, only one process can succeed at most. This atomicity of check-and-create is ensured at the operating system kernel level.

Note that we cannot use "mkdir -p" to automatically create missing path components: "mkdir -p" does not return an error if the directory exists already, but that's the feature we rely upon to ensure mutual exclusion.

Now let's spice up this example by automatically removing the lock when the script finishes:

This example provides reliable mutual exclusion. There is still the disadvantage that a stale lock file could remain when the script is terminated with a signal not caught (or signal 9, SIGKILL), but it's a good step towards reliable mutual exclusion. An example that remedies this (contributed by Charles Duffy) follows:

Instead of using mkdir we could also have used the program to create a symbolic link, ln -s.

I believe using if (set -C; >$lockfile); then ... is equally save if not safer. The Bash source uses open(filename, flags|O_EXCL, mode); which should be atomic on almost all platforms (with the exception of some versions of NFS where mkdir may not be atomic either). I haven't traced the path of the flags variable, which must contain O_CREAT, nor have I looked at any other shells. I wouldn't suggest using this until someone else can backup my claims. --Andy753421

Using set -C does not work with ksh88. Ksh88 does not use O_EXCL, when you set noclobber (-C). --jrw32982

For more discussion on these issues, see ProcessManagement.