Optimal lock file method

Question

Windows has an option to open a file with exclusive access rights. Unix doesn\'t.

In order to ensure exclusive access to some file or device, it is common practice

Answer 1

You should probably be using flock(), as in

fd = open(filename, O_RDWR | O_CREAT, 0666); // open or create lockfile
//check open success...
rc = flock(fd, LOCK_EX | LOCK_NB); // grab exclusive lock, fail if can't obtain.
if (rc)
{
    // fail
}