Quick-and-dirty way to ensure only one instance of

Question

What's a quick-and-dirty way to make sure that only one instance of a shell script is running at a given time?

Answer 1

To make locking reliable you need an atomic operation. Many of the above proposals are not atomic. The proposed lockfile(1) utility looks promising as the man-page mentioned, that its "NFS-resistant". If your OS does not support lockfile(1) and your solution has to work on NFS, you have not many options....

NFSv2 has two atomic operations:

• symlink
• rename

With NFSv3 the create call is also atomic.

Directory operations are NOT atomic under NFSv2 and NFSv3 (please refer to the book 'NFS Illustrated' by Brent Callaghan, ISBN 0-201-32570-5; Brent is a NFS-veteran at Sun).

Knowing this, you can implement spin-locks for files and directories (in shell, not PHP):

lock current dir:

while ! ln -s . lock; do :; done

lock a file:

while ! ln -s ${f} ${f}.lock; do :; done

unlock current dir (assumption, the running process really acquired the lock):

mv lock deleteme && rm deleteme

unlock a file (assumption, the running process really acquired the lock):

mv ${f}.lock ${f}.deleteme && rm ${f}.deleteme

Remove is also not atomic, therefore first the rename (which is atomic) and then the remove.

For the symlink and rename calls, both filenames have to reside on the same filesystem. My proposal: use only simple filenames (no paths) and put file and lock into the same directory.

Answer 2

Create a lock file in a known location and check for existence on script start? Putting the PID in the file might be helpful if someone's attempting to track down an errant instance that's preventing execution of the script.

Answer 3

Here's an approach that combines atomic directory locking with a check for stale lock via PID and restart if stale. Also, this does not rely on any bashisms.

#!/bin/dash

SCRIPTNAME=$(basename $0)
LOCKDIR="/var/lock/${SCRIPTNAME}"
PIDFILE="${LOCKDIR}/pid"

if ! mkdir $LOCKDIR 2>/dev/null
then
    # lock failed, but check for stale one by checking if the PID is really existing
    PID=$(cat $PIDFILE)
    if ! kill -0 $PID 2>/dev/null
    then
       echo "Removing stale lock of nonexistent PID ${PID}" >&2
       rm -rf $LOCKDIR
       echo "Restarting myself (${SCRIPTNAME})" >&2
       exec "$0" "$@"
    fi
    echo "$SCRIPTNAME is already running, bailing out" >&2
    exit 1
else
    # lock successfully acquired, save PID
    echo $$ > $PIDFILE
fi

trap "rm -rf ${LOCKDIR}" QUIT INT TERM EXIT


echo hello

sleep 30s

echo bye

Answer 4

The semaphoric utility uses flock (as discussed above, e.g. by presto8) to implement a counting semaphore. It enables any specific number of concurrent processes you want. We use it to limit the level of concurrency of various queue worker processes.

It's like sem but much lighter-weight. (Full disclosure: I wrote it after finding the sem was way too heavy for our needs and there wasn't a simple counting semaphore utility available.)

Answer 5

I find that bmdhack's solution is the most practical, at least for my use case. Using flock and lockfile rely on removing the lockfile using rm when the script terminates, which can't always be guaranteed (e.g., kill -9).

I would change one minor thing about bmdhack's solution: It makes a point of removing the lock file, without stating that this is unnecessary for the safe working of this semaphore. His use of kill -0 ensures that an old lockfile for a dead process will simply be ignored/over-written.

My simplified solution is therefore to simply add the following to the top of your singleton:

## Test the lock
LOCKFILE=/tmp/singleton.lock 
if [ -e ${LOCKFILE} ] && kill -0 `cat ${LOCKFILE}`; then
    echo "Script already running. bye!"
    exit 
fi

## Set the lock 
echo $$ > ${LOCKFILE}

Of course, this script still has the flaw that processes that are likely to start at the same time have a race hazard, as the lock test and set operations are not a single atomic action. But the proposed solution for this by lhunath to use mkdir has the flaw that a killed script may leave behind the directory, thus preventing other instances from running.

Answer 6

I wanted to do away with lockfiles, lockdirs, special locking programs and even pidof since it isn't found on all Linux installations. Also wanted to have the simplest code possible (or at least as few lines as possible). Simplest if statement, in one line:

if [[ $(ps axf | awk -v pid=$$ '$1!=pid && $6~/'$(basename $0)'/{print $1}') ]]; then echo "Already running"; exit; fi