I've got a script that needs to: The file gets written/appended to by a different process, at unpredictable intervals, so I lock the file while I'm parsing it. Here's some code: 
open (FILE, $my_file);
flock FILE, 2; #exclusive lock

#Parse file and do various things with the content.

flock FILE, 8; # unlock
close ( FILE );
unlink $my_file;

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There are plenty of "or die" and "or warn" clauses in the real code, so I'll know if something fails. What bothers me is that closing sequence. It's possible that $my_file could get written to after it gets unlocked, and then vanish when it gets unlinked. Is there a better way to handle this kind of thing?

In reply to Avoiding a race condition by Ian the Terrible

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