Python: Lock a file

Question

I have a Python app running on Linux. It is called every minute from cron. It checks a directory for files and if it finds one it processes it - this can take several minute

Answer 1

After fumbling with many schemes, this works in my case. I have a script that may be executed multiple times simultaneously. I need these instances to wait their turn to read/write to some files. The lockfile does not need to be deleted, so you avoid blocking all access if one script fails before deleting it.

import fcntl

def acquireLock():
    ''' acquire exclusive lock file access '''
    locked_file_descriptor = open('lockfile.LOCK', 'w+')
    fcntl.lockf(locked_file_descriptor, fcntl.LOCK_EX)
    return locked_file_descriptor

def releaseLock(locked_file_descriptor):
    ''' release exclusive lock file access '''
    locked_file_descriptor.close()

lock_fd = acquireLock()

# ... do stuff with exclusive access to your file(s)

releaseLock(lock_fd)