I wouldn't store it right in the script for these reasons at least:

• One day you may need the counter in some other programs, and accessing it could be harder than it needs to be
• There are several good reasons for not altering production scripts. Think about the consequencies of restoring the script from an old backup for example, the counter would be restored to an old, incosistent value
• It makes debugging and testing unnecessarily complicated: unless you take precautions (e.g. a production counter and a test counter on different sections after the end of the script)
• You may not have write permissions on the script at all, which is probably going to be the case, or the script itself might be on a read-only partition (quite an interesting security measure, especially when we're talking about finance and transactional computing)

The most reasonable choice is probably following the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle, storing the counter in a plaintext (easy debugging, no libraries required) file where locking prevents messy race contitions or nasty inconsistencies. Naturally the file name shouldn't be hardcoded in the source.

-- TMTOWTDI

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