I don't have time to test this, but you should be able to unlink the file before you close it. Unix will mark a file to be deleted, but it won't actually delete the file until the file is closed.

You can also open the file in read/write mode. Read from the file then truncate the file to nothing and close it. 

open (FILE,"+</path/file");
flock (FILE,2);

# Do something with the data

seek (FILE,0,0);
truncate (FILE,tell (FILE));
close FILE; #file unlocks when closed

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In reply to Re: Avoiding a race condition by c-era
in thread Avoiding a race condition by Ian the Terrible

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