How do I lock a file in Perl?

The other answers cover Perl flock locking pretty well, but on many Unix/Linux systems there are actually two independent locking systems: BSD flock() and POSIX fcntl()-based locks.

Unless you provide special options to configure when building Perl, its flock will use flock() if available. This is generally fine and probably what you want if you just need locking within your application (running on a single system). However, sometimes you need to interact with another application that uses fcntl() locks (like Sendmail, on many systems) or perhaps you need to do file locking across NFS-mounted filesystems.

In those cases, you might want to look at File::FcntlLock or File::lockf. It is also possible to do fcntl()-based locking in pure Perl (with some hairy and non-portable bits of pack()).

Quick overview of flock/fcntl/lockf differences:

lockf is almost always implemented on top of fcntl, has file-level locking only. If implemented using fcntl, limitations below also apply to lockf.

fcntl provides range-level locking (within a file) and network locking over NFS, but locks are not inherited by child processes after a fork(). On many systems, you must have the filehandle open read-only to request a shared lock, and read-write to request an exclusive lock.

flock has file-level locking only, locking is only within a single machine (you can lock an NFS-mounted file, but only local processes will see the lock). Locks are inherited by children (assuming that the file descriptor is not closed).

Sometimes (SYSV systems) flock is emulated using lockf, or fcntl; on some BSD systems lockf is emulated using flock. Generally these sorts of emulation work poorly and you are well advised to avoid them.

If you end up using flock, here's some code to do it:

use Fcntl ':flock'; # Import LOCK_* constants

# We will use this file path in error messages and function calls.
# Don't type it out more than once in your code.  Use a variable.
my $file = '/path/to/some/file';

# Open the file for appending.  Note the file path is quoted
# in the error message.  This helps debug situations where you
# have a stray space at the start or end of the path.
open(my $fh, '>>', $file) or die "Could not open '$file' - $!";

# Get exclusive lock (will block until it does)
flock($fh, LOCK_EX) or die "Could not lock '$file' - $!";

# Do something with the file here...

# Do NOT use flock() to unlock the file if you wrote to the
# file in the "do something" section above.  This could create
# a race condition.  The close() call below will unlock the
# file for you, but only after writing any buffered data.

# In a world of buffered i/o, some or all of your data may not 
# be written until close() completes.  Always, always, ALWAYS 
# check the return value of close() if you wrote to the file!
close($fh) or die "Could not write '$file' - $!";

Some useful links:

• PerlMonks file locking tutorial (somewhat old)
• flock() documentation

In response to your added question, I'd say either place the lock on the file or create a file that you call 'lock' whenever the file is locked and delete it when it is no longer locked (and then make sure your programs obey those semantics).