in reply to flock on Windows : process killed while in critical region
Now I wonder: Could there be cases, where a process gets killed while being in the critical region, BUT the lock is not being released (and therefore all other processes would be locked out forever)?
In a nutshell: No, that cannot happen.
However, if a process terminates whilst holding a lock, it may be some time before the OS gets around to releasing the lock -- dependent upon the availability of suitable system resources -- so attempts to acquire the lock should be programmed to retry, without tight loop polling, as a tight polling loop can itself be the cause of the unavailability of those system resources.
(For more info, see the "Remarks" under LockFile(Ex)(), which is the system call that underlies perl's emulation of flock() on Windows.)
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