Hi Monks,

I have a script that is run every minute on a machine to automate some processes and communicate with a server. However if 2 of the scripts are running at the same time, it does not end well. To get around this I used "flock or die" on a file I create at the root of C:. This has worked perfectly on every single windows OS I have tried, apart from Vista.

For some reason, even if the process is the first to run since the machine has booted up, Vista very rarely grants the lock to the process the script is running in, thus the script exits and this will then repeat itself every minute.

I have also tried simply checking for the existing of the lock file, but this doesnt work either as somehow vista manages to create the file before checking if it exists, despite the check coming first in the code.

Do you know of any alternatives to flock that I can use in order to stop more then one script running at any given time?

Thanks In Advance!

In reply to Frustration with File Locking in Vista by Mikey3883

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.