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

If flock's limitations, which have already been described elsewhere on this thread, aren't an issue for you, then this should work:

#!/bin/bash

{
    # exit if we are unable to obtain a lock; this would happen if 
    # the script is already running elsewhere
    # note: -x (exclusive) is the default
    flock -n 100 || exit

    # put commands to run here
    sleep 100
} 100>/tmp/myjob.lock