Perl Cookbook

Locking a File

Problem

Many processes need to update the same file simultaneously.

Solution

Have all processes honor advisory locking by using flock:

open(FH, "+< $path")                or die "can't open $path: $!";
flock(FH, 2)                        or die "can't flock $path: $!";
# update file, then...
close(FH)                           or die "can't close $path: $!";

Discussion

Operating systems vary greatly in the type and reliability of locking techniques available. Perl tries hard to give you something that works, even if your operating system uses its own underlying technique. The flock function takes two arguments: a filehandle and a number representing what to do with the lock on that filehandle. The numbers are normally represented by names like LOCK_EX, which you can get from the Fcntl or IO::File modules.

The LOCK_SH, LOCK_EX, LOCK_UN, and LOCK_NB symbolic values were not available in the Fcntl module before the 5.004 release, and even now they are available only if you ask for them specifically using the :flock tag. Their values are 1, 2, 4, and 8 respectively, which you may supply yourself instead of using the symbolic constants. You’ll therefore often see people write:

sub LOCK_SH()  { 1 }     #  Shared lock (for reading)
sub LOCK_EX()  { 2 }     #  Exclusive lock (for writing)
sub LOCK_NB()  { 4 }     #  Non-blocking request (don't stall)
sub LOCK_UN()  { 8 }     #  Free the lock (careful!)

Locks come in two varieties: shared and exclusive. Despite what you might infer by “exclusive,” processes aren’t required to obey locks on files. Another way of ...