Up until today, I was a happy user of Proc::PID::File. But this morning, one of my servers ran out of disk space on /var, and that module wasn't able to write out its pidfile anymore. The result was a process table full of long-running cron jobs, bringing the machine down due to excessive swapping.

Is there a better alternative for Proc::PID::File that will gracefully handle reboots *and* running out of disk space?

I want to be certain only one job runs at a time, even if I'm not managing my disk space properly :)

Update: obviously, a code snippet is in order (sorry, grep): 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Proc::PID::File;
die "Already running!" if Proc::PID::File->running;

# rest of script follows

[download]

Another update: Just so I don't come off like a complete idiot, here's what happened to this machine. It has a replicating MySQL slave running, and somewhere during the night, there was an error with it. The result was that the slave kept recording the relay-bin logs, but didn't process them. Since our data changes a lot, the slave quickly filled up the disk. I don't think monitoring tools would have avoided me waking up to a thrashing box.

In reply to Whoa! looking for a better pidfile module by rhesa

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