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

Answered a million times already, but another way, without the need for external dependencies:

LOCK_FILE="/var/lock/$(basename "$0").pid"
trap "rm -f ${LOCK_FILE}; exit" INT TERM EXIT
if [[ -f $LOCK_FILE && -d /proc/`cat $LOCK_FILE` ]]; then
   // Process already exists
   exit 1
fi
echo $$ > $LOCK_FILE

Each time it writes the current PID ($$) into the lockfile and on script startup checks if a process is running with the latest PID.

Answer 2

I use oneliner @ the very beginning of script:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $(pgrep -afc "$(basename "$0")") -gt "1" ]]; then echo "Another instance of "$0" has already been started!" && exit; fi
.
the_beginning_of_actual_script

It is good to see the presence of process in the memory (no matter what the status of process is); but it does the job for me.

Answer 3

Quick and dirty?

#!/bin/sh

if [ -f sometempfile ]
  echo "Already running... will now terminate."
  exit
else
  touch sometempfile
fi

..do what you want here..

rm sometempfile

Answer 4

There's a wrapper around the flock(2) system call called, unimaginatively, flock(1). This makes it relatively easy to reliably obtain exclusive locks without worrying about cleanup etc. There are examples on the man page as to how to use it in a shell script.

Answer 5

Here's an approach that combines atomic directory locking with a check for stale lock via PID and restart if stale. Also, this does not rely on any bashisms.

#!/bin/dash

SCRIPTNAME=$(basename $0)
LOCKDIR="/var/lock/${SCRIPTNAME}"
PIDFILE="${LOCKDIR}/pid"

if ! mkdir $LOCKDIR 2>/dev/null
then
    # lock failed, but check for stale one by checking if the PID is really existing
    PID=$(cat $PIDFILE)
    if ! kill -0 $PID 2>/dev/null
    then
       echo "Removing stale lock of nonexistent PID ${PID}" >&2
       rm -rf $LOCKDIR
       echo "Restarting myself (${SCRIPTNAME})" >&2
       exec "$0" "$@"
    fi
    echo "$SCRIPTNAME is already running, bailing out" >&2
    exit 1
else
    # lock successfully acquired, save PID
    echo $$ > $PIDFILE
fi

trap "rm -rf ${LOCKDIR}" QUIT INT TERM EXIT


echo hello

sleep 30s

echo bye

Answer 6

The semaphoric utility uses flock (as discussed above, e.g. by presto8) to implement a counting semaphore. It enables any specific number of concurrent processes you want. We use it to limit the level of concurrency of various queue worker processes.

It's like sem but much lighter-weight. (Full disclosure: I wrote it after finding the sem was way too heavy for our needs and there wasn't a simple counting semaphore utility available.)