A new and very robust method for doing file locking over NFS?

[Douglas Alan]

Andy Jewell <andy at wild-flower.co.uk> writes:

> It depends on how other processes are playing with your files; what
> if another program is just scanning directories and opening files at
> random?  If this program doesn't know your locking scheme, it'll
> just walk all over your process...

This is just business as usual for Unix, so I'm used to living with
this worry.  File locking on Unix is typically only advisory, even
when locking files exclusively on local filesystems, and I've seen on
occasion, for instance, Linux distributions where the mail delivery
agent and the mail reading agent were compiled to use different
advisory locking methods.  When this happens the result, of course, is
not so robust.

In any case, I am glad to hear that you have had success with a very
similar strategy as mine.  It gives me some confidence that my
approach will work well.

|>oug