If you want flock to return immediately rather than wait for a lock to become free, you need a 'non-blocking' lock. eg:

flock LOCKFILE, LOCK_EX | LOCK_NB or die;

A trick I learned from Dominus is to open $0 for reading and lock it rather than creating a separate file for locking.

In reply to Re: Question about Flock and die by grantm
in thread Question about Flock and die by acarvalh

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