"EH" == Earl Hood <ehood(_at_)hydra(_dot_)acs(_dot_)uci(_dot_)edu>
writes:
EH> Since mhonarc will eventually require Perl 5, I am mostly curious about
EH> fcntl/flock support in Perl 5 on various OSs.
Don't even bother until 5.004. The current 5.004beta supports flock (or a
suitable emulation) for non-NFS filesystems on all of the modern UNIX
systems and most of the old ones, I think. It also builds out of the
tarfile on '95 and NT, but I don't think locking works on those systems.
BTW, I found out that using a directory as the lock file may
provide an OS independent way to lock archives. mkdir() should
return 0 if the directory already exists. Permissions play
no part (at least on Unix) for directories. And at some
low level within mkdir, there is (should be) an atomic operation
to avoid race conditions.
The next release will use this method. We'll have to wait for
feedback from non-Unix users if it works for their OS.
--ewh
