What's a quick-and-dirty way to make sure that only one instance of a shell script is running at a given time?
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2315answers:
10Create a lock file in a known location and check for existence on script start? Putting the PID in the file might be helpful if someone's attempting to track down an errant instance that's preventing execution of the script.
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
PID and lockfiles are definitely the most reliable. When you attempt to run the program, it can check for the lockfile which and if it exists, it can use ps
to see if the process is still running. If it's not, the script can start, updating the PID in the lockfile to its own.
Here's an implementation that uses a lockfile and echos a pid into it. This protects if the process is killed before removing the pidfile:
LOCKFILE=/tmp/lock.txt
if [ -e ${LOCKFILE} ] && kill -0 `cat ${LOCKFILE}`; then
echo "already running"
exit
fi
# make sure the lockfile is removed when we exit and then claim it
trap "rm -f ${LOCKFILE}; exit" INT TERM EXIT
echo $$ > ${LOCKFILE}
# do stuff
sleep 1000
rm -f ${LOCKFILE}
The trick here is the kill -0 which doesn't deliver any signal but just checks if a pid is running. Also the call to trap will ensure that the lockfile is removed even when your process is killed (except kill -9).
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.
The issues with some of the above answers is that they are not atomic, so you could still run into issues if two scripts tried to run at about the same time.
Some unixes have lockfile
which is very similar to the already mentioned flock
.
From the manpage:
lockfile can be used to create one or more semaphore files. If lock- file can't create all the specified files (in the specified order), it waits sleeptime (defaults to 8) seconds and retries the last file that didn't succeed. You can specify the number of retries to do until failure is returned. If the number of retries is -1 (default, i.e., -r-1) lockfile will retry forever.
To make locking reliable you need an atomic operation. Many of the above proposals are not atomic. The proposed lockfile(1) utility looks promising as the man-page mentioned, that its "NFS-resistant". If your OS does not support lockfile(1) and your solution has to work on NFS, you have not many options....
NFSv2 has two atomic operations:
- symlink
- rename
With NFSv3 the create call is also atomic.
Directory operations are NOT atomic under NFSv2 and NFSv3 (please refer to the book 'NFS Illustrated' by Brent Callaghan, ISBN 0-201-32570-5; Brent is a NFS-veteran at Sun).
Knowing this, you can implement spin-locks for files and directories (in shell, not PHP):
lock current dir:
while ! ln -s . lock; do :; done
lock a file:
while ! ln -s ${f} ${f}.lock; do :; done
unlock current dir (assumption, the running process really acquired the lock):
mv lock deleteme && rm deleteme
unlock a file (assumption, the running process really acquired the lock):
mv ${f}.lock ${f}.deleteme && rm ${f}.deleteme
Remove is also not atomic, therefore first the rename (which is atomic) and then the remove.
For the symlink and rename calls, both filenames have to reside on the same filesystem. My proposal: use only simple filenames (no paths) and put file and lock into the same directory.
All approaches that use lock files are flawed.
Why? Because there is no way to check whether a file exists and create it in a single atomic action. Because of this; there is a race condition that WILL make your attempts at mutual exclusion break.
Instead, you need to use mkdir
. mkdir
creates a directory if it doesn't exist yet, and if it does, it sets an exit code. More importantly, it does all this in a single atomic action making it perfect for this scenario.
if ! mkdir /tmp/myscript.lock 2>/dev/null; then
echo "Myscript is already running." >&2
exit 1
fi
For all details, see the excellent BashFAQ: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/045
When targeting a Debian machine I find the lockfile-progs
package to be a good solution. procmail
also comes with a lockfile
tool. However sometimes I am stuck with neither of these.
Here's my solution which uses mkdir
for atomic-ness and a PID file to detect stale locks. This code is currently in production on a Cygwin setup and works well.
To use it simply call exclusive_lock_require
when you need get exclusive access to something. An optional lock name parameter lets you share locks between different scripts. There's also two lower level functions (exclusive_lock_try
and exclusive_lock_retry
) should you need something more complex.
function exclusive_lock_try() # [lockname]
{
local LOCK_NAME="${1:-`basename $0`}"
LOCK_DIR="/tmp/.${LOCK_NAME}.lock"
local LOCK_PID_FILE="${LOCK_DIR}/${LOCK_NAME}.pid"
if [ -e "$LOCK_DIR" ]
then
local LOCK_PID="`cat "$LOCK_PID_FILE" 2> /dev/null`"
if [ ! -z "$LOCK_PID" ] && kill -0 "$LOCK_PID" 2> /dev/null
then
# locked by non-dead process
echo "\"$LOCK_NAME\" lock currently held by PID $LOCK_PID"
return 1
else
# orphaned lock, take it over
( echo $$ > "$LOCK_PID_FILE" ) 2> /dev/null && local LOCK_PID="$$"
fi
fi
if [ "`trap -p EXIT`" != "" ]
then
# already have an EXIT trap
echo "Cannot get lock, already have an EXIT trap"
return 1
fi
if [ "$LOCK_PID" != "$$" ] &&
! ( umask 077 && mkdir "$LOCK_DIR" && umask 177 && echo $$ > "$LOCK_PID_FILE" ) 2> /dev/null
then
local LOCK_PID="`cat "$LOCK_PID_FILE" 2> /dev/null`"
# unable to acquire lock, new process got in first
echo "\"$LOCK_NAME\" lock currently held by PID $LOCK_PID"
return 1
fi
trap "/bin/rm -rf \"$LOCK_DIR\"; exit;" EXIT
return 0 # got lock
}
function exclusive_lock_retry() # [lockname] [retries] [delay]
{
local LOCK_NAME="$1"
local MAX_TRIES="${2:-5}"
local DELAY="${3:-2}"
local TRIES=0
local LOCK_RETVAL
while [ "$TRIES" -lt "$MAX_TRIES" ]
do
if [ "$TRIES" -gt 0 ]
then
sleep "$DELAY"
fi
local TRIES=$(( $TRIES + 1 ))
if [ "$TRIES" -lt "$MAX_TRIES" ]
then
exclusive_lock_try "$LOCK_NAME" > /dev/null
else
exclusive_lock_try "$LOCK_NAME"
fi
LOCK_RETVAL="${PIPESTATUS[0]}"
if [ "$LOCK_RETVAL" -eq 0 ]
then
return 0
fi
done
return "$LOCK_RETVAL"
}
function exclusive_lock_require() # [lockname] [retries] [delay]
{
if ! exclusive_lock_retry "$@"
then
exit 1
fi
}