You would have a serious race condition.

Invocation 1 comes along, opens the file, and flocks it.

Invocation 2 comes along, opens the file, and blocks on the flock.

Invocation 1 leaves and unlinks the file, dropping the lock it had.

Invocation 2 gets its lock on a temporary that only will exist until Invocation 2 is done.

Invocation 3 comes along, sees no file, creates, flocks, and now Invocations 2 and 3 are running in parallel...

(This is all with Unix filesystem semantics of course.)

In reply to RE (tilly) 2 Locking a script by tilly
in thread Locking a script by Anonymous Monk

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