Quick-and-dirty way to ensure only one instance of a shell script is running at a time

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

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