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A Linux Shell Script With An Effective Locking Mechanism Using /proc

I recently had to write a Bash shell script that had locking capabilities, and I couldn’t find any decent examples online that would do the trick. My colleague Laurie showed me this example that works pretty well.

There are a few issues with using locks that, if the script is not carefully written, can come up:

  • If the script dies before it can delete the lock file, you’ll want to delete the lock file when the script runs again. So you’ll want to write a value in the lock to know if the process is running, and using the process ID is the safe bet..
  • But you have to make sure that the PID isn’t some other process that happened to get the PID since the last crash. So you can check /proc and make sure that the process really is your script.

Below is the code:

#!/bin/sh

# Locking mechanism
BASENAME=${0##*/}
PIDFILE_BASE=/var/run/kiosk/$BASENAME
PIDFILE=$PIDFILE_BASE.$$

#Look for existing lock files
PIDFILES=`ls $PIDFILE_BASE* 2&> /dev/null`

if [ -n "$PIDFILES" ] ; then
    # Found existing lock file
    for P in $PIDFILES ; do
        # Get the PID
        PID=`cat $P`
        if [ -f /proc/$PID/cmdline ] ; then
            CMD=`cat /proc/$PID/cmdline`
            if [ "${CMD//$BASENAME}" != "$CMD" ] ; then
                # Lock file exists, exit script
                exit 1
            else
                # Found a bogus PID, deleting it
                rm -f $P
            fi
        else
            # Found a dead PID, deleting it
            rm -f $P
        fi
    done
fi

echo $$ > $PIDFILE

# Do whatever it is you need to do here...

# Remove the lock file
rm -f $PIDFILE

exit 0