System is a blocking call. Here is the begining of the man page for lockfile. Does that help? 

       lockfile can be used  to  create  one  or  more  semaphore
       files.   If  lockfile can't create all the specified files
       (in the specified order), it waits sleeptime (defaults  to
       8)  seconds and retries the last file that didn't succeed.
       You can specify the number of retries to do until  failure
       is  returned.   If  the  number of retries is -1 (default,
       i.e., -r-1) lockfile will retry forever.

[download]

So it is not able to create the file and it retries forever. Actually you are setting -2 as the retry interval and trying to set a max of 5 retries so it sould return after 10 seconds but it is not. GOK. Why shell out to create lockfiles anyway? Why not just do it native say like 

sysopen($fh, "$dir/$name", O_CREAT | O_EXCL | O_RDWR, 0600);

[download]

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

In reply to Re: Perl script crashing at lockfile ? by tachyon
in thread Perl script crashing at lockfile ? by peterr

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