Quick-and-dirty way to ensure only one instance of a shell script is running at a time

Question

What\'s a quick-and-dirty way to make sure that only one instance of a shell script is running at a given time?

Answer 1

The existing answers posted either rely on the CLI utility flock or do not properly secure the lock file. The flock utility is not available on all non-Linux systems (i.e. FreeBSD), and does not work properly on NFS.

In my early days of system administration and system development, I was told that a safe and relatively portable method of creating a lock file was to create a temp file using mkemp(3) or mkemp(1), write identifying information to the temp file (i.e. PID), then hard link the temp file to the lock file. If the link was successful, then you have successfully obtained the lock.

When using locks in shell scripts, I typically place an obtain_lock() function in a shared profile and then source it from the scripts. Below is an example of my lock function:

obtain_lock()
{
  LOCK="${1}"
  LOCKDIR="$(dirname "${LOCK}")"
  LOCKFILE="$(basename "${LOCK}")"

  # create temp lock file
  TMPLOCK=$(mktemp -p "${LOCKDIR}" "${LOCKFILE}XXXXXX" 2> /dev/null)
  if test "x${TMPLOCK}" == "x";then
     echo "unable to create temporary file with mktemp" 1>&2
     return 1
  fi
  echo "$$" > "${TMPLOCK}"

  # attempt to obtain lock file
  ln "${TMPLOCK}" "${LOCK}" 2> /dev/null
  if test $? -ne 0;then
     rm -f "${TMPLOCK}"
     echo "unable to obtain lockfile" 1>&2
     if test -f "${LOCK}";then
        echo "current lock information held by: $(cat "${LOCK}")" 1>&2
     fi
     return 2
  fi
  rm -f "${TMPLOCK}"

  return 0;
};

The following is an example of how to use the lock function:

#!/bin/sh

. /path/to/locking/profile.sh
PROG_LOCKFILE="/tmp/myprog.lock"

clean_up()
{
  rm -f "${PROG_LOCKFILE}"
}

obtain_lock "${PROG_LOCKFILE}"
if test $? -ne 0;then
   exit 1
fi
trap clean_up SIGHUP SIGINT SIGTERM

# bulk of script

clean_up
exit 0
# end of script

Remember to call clean_up at any exit points in your script.

I've used the above in both Linux and FreeBSD environments.