First, remarks like "I think everybody knows how much adavnced is UNIX over NT" are considered trolling here in The Monastary, especially since more "advanced" is a purely subjective term.

Second, you seem to be somewhat confused. You compare NT and Unix, and then present a problem on your Win98 machine, and then ask a question about NT. This tells me that your first remark may not be based on experience, more like "religious" beliefs.

Win NT/2K/XP are a completely different OS from Win 95/98/ME, the only way they are the same is look and feel, same company developing, and many similar application layer API's for compatability. flock() is useable under Win NT code base (at least in Win2k and XP) and this code worked just fine:

use strict ;
use Fcntl qw/:flock/ ;
open (TEST, ">>test.dat") or die "can't open file: $!\n" ;
flock (TEST,LOCK_EX) ;
print TEST "test2\n" ;
close TEST ;
[download]

I'm not certain if it works under Win9x or not, it may very well not, as I said it is a totally different OS.

As for finding out what does and does not work, AFAIR, O'Reilly's Advanced Perl Programming goes into that in some detail. I have always found though, that test scripts like the one above work much better finding out exactly what works and what does not. And like stated above perlport is a great resource.

"Nothing is sure but death and taxes" I say combine the two and its death to all taxes!