atomically creating a file lock in MATLAB (file mutex)

Question

I am looking for a simple already implemented solution for atomically creating a file lock in MATLAB.

Something like:

file_lock(\'create\', \'mylockf         


        

Answer 1

If you only need to run on OS X and Linux (not Windows), you can use the following:

pathLock='/tmp/test.lock'

% Try to create and lock this file.
% In my case I use -r 0 to avoid retrying
% You could use -r -1 to retry forever, or for a particular amount of time,
% etc, see `man lockfile` for details.
if ~system(sprintf('lockfile -r 0 %s',pathLock))
    % We succeeded, so perform some task which needs to be serialized.
    % runSerializedTask()
    % Now remove the lockfile
    system(sprintf('rm -f %s',pathLock));
end