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

Quick and dirty?

#!/bin/sh

if [ -f sometempfile ]
  echo "Already running... will now terminate."
  exit
else
  touch sometempfile
fi

..do what you want here..

rm sometempfile