What is the best way to ensure only one instance of a Bash script is running? [duplicate]

Question

Advisory locking has been used for ages and it can be used in bash scripts. I prefer simple flock (from util-linux[-ng]) over lockfile (from procmail). And always remember about a trap on exit (sigspec == EXIT or 0, trapping specific signals is superfluous) in those scripts.

In 2009 I released my lockable script boilerplate (originally available at my wiki page, nowadays available as gist). Transforming that into one-instance-per-user is trivial. Using it you can also easily write scripts for other scenarios requiring some locking or synchronization.

Here is the mentioned boilerplate for your convenience.

#!/bin/bash
# SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

## Copyright (C) 2009 Przemyslaw Pawelczyk <[email protected]>
##
## This script is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.
## https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
#
# Lockable script boilerplate

### HEADER ###

LOCKFILE="/var/lock/`basename $0`"
LOCKFD=99

# PRIVATE
_lock()             { flock -$1 $LOCKFD; }
_no_more_locking()  { _lock u; _lock xn && rm -f $LOCKFILE; }
_prepare_locking()  { eval "exec $LOCKFD>\"$LOCKFILE\""; trap _no_more_locking EXIT; }

# ON START
_prepare_locking

# PUBLIC
exlock_now()        { _lock xn; }  # obtain an exclusive lock immediately or fail
exlock()            { _lock x; }   # obtain an exclusive lock
shlock()            { _lock s; }   # obtain a shared lock
unlock()            { _lock u; }   # drop a lock

### BEGIN OF SCRIPT ###

# Simplest example is avoiding running multiple instances of script.
exlock_now || exit 1

# Remember! Lock file is removed when one of the scripts exits and it is
#           the only script holding the lock or lock is not acquired at all.

If the script is the same across all users, you can use a lockfile approach. If you acquire the lock, proceed else show a message and exit.

As an example:

[Terminal #1] $ lockfile -r 0 /tmp/the.lock
[Terminal #1] $ 

[Terminal #2] $ lockfile -r 0 /tmp/the.lock
[Terminal #2] lockfile: Sorry, giving up on "/tmp/the.lock"

[Terminal #1] $ rm -f /tmp/the.lock
[Terminal #1] $ 

[Terminal #2] $ lockfile -r 0 /tmp/the.lock
[Terminal #2] $ 

After /tmp/the.lock has been acquired your script will be the only one with access to execution. When you are done, just remove the lock. In script form this might look like:

#!/bin/bash

lockfile -r 0 /tmp/the.lock || exit 1

# Do stuff here

rm -f /tmp/the.lock

I think flock is probably the easiest (and most memorable) variant. I use it in a cron job to auto-encode dvds and cds

# try to run a command, but fail immediately if it's already running
flock -n /var/lock/myjob.lock   my_bash_command

Use -w for timeouts or leave out options to wait until the lock is released. Finally, the man page shows a nice example for multiple commands:

   (
     flock -n 9 || exit 1
     # ... commands executed under lock ...
   ) 9>/var/lock/mylockfile

Use the set -o noclobber option and attempt to overwrite a common file.

A short example

if ! (set -o noclobber ; echo > /tmp/global.lock) ; then
    exit 1  # the global.lock already exists
fi

# ... remainder of script ...

---

A longer example

This example will wait for the global.lock file but timeout after too long.

 function lockfile_waithold()
 {
    declare -ir time_beg=$(date '+%s')
    declare -ir time_max=7140  # 7140 s = 1 hour 59 min.
 
    # poll for lock file up to ${time_max}s
    # put debugging info in lock file in case of issues ...
    while ! \
       (set -o noclobber ; \
        echo -e "DATE:$(date)\nUSER:$(whoami)\nPID:$$" > /tmp/global.lock \ 
       ) 2>/dev/null
    do
        if [ $(($(date '+%s') - ${time_beg})) -gt ${time_max} ] ; then
            echo "Error: waited too long for lock file /tmp/global.lock" 1>&2
            return 1
        fi
        sleep 1
    done
 
    return 0
 }
 
 function lockfile_release()
 {
    rm -f /tmp/global.lock
 }
 
 if ! lockfile_waithold ; then
      exit 1
 fi
 trap lockfile_release EXIT
 
 # ... remainder of script ...

This has reliably worked for me on an Ubuntu 16 host with multiple instances of a bash script that used the same system-wide "lock" file.

(This is similar to this post by @Barry Kelly which was noticed afterward.)

i found this in procmail package dependencies:

apt install liblockfile-bin

To run: dotlockfile -l file.lock

file.lock will be created.

To unlock: dotlockfile -u file.lock

Use this to list this package files / command: dpkg-query -L liblockfile-bin