man-pages/man2/flock.2

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.\" and Copyright 2002 Michael Kerrisk
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.\" Modified Fri Jan 31 16:26:07 1997 by Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
.\" Modified Fri Dec 11 17:57:27 1998 by Jamie Lokier <jamie@imbolc.ucc.ie>
.\" Modified 24 Apr 2002 by Michael Kerrisk <mtk-manpages@gmx.net>
.\"	Substantial rewrites and additions
.\" 2005-05-10 mtk, noted that lock conversions are not atomic.
.\"
.TH FLOCK 2 2002-04-24 Linux "Linux Programmer's Manual"
.SH NAME
flock \- apply or remove an advisory lock on an open file
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B #include <sys/file.h>
.sp
.BI "int flock(int " fd ", int " operation );
.SH DESCRIPTION
Apply or remove an advisory lock on the open file specified by
.IR fd .
The parameter
.I operation
is one of the following:
.RS
.TP 1.0i
.B LOCK_SH
Place a shared lock.
More than one process may hold a shared lock for a given file
at a given time.
.TP
.B LOCK_EX
Place an exclusive lock.
Only one process may hold an exclusive lock for a given
file at a given time.
.TP
.B LOCK_UN
Remove an existing lock held by this process.
.sp
.RE
A call to
.BR flock ()
may block if an incompatible lock is held by another process.
To make a non-blocking request, include
.B LOCK_NB
(by
.IR OR ing)
with any of the above operations.

A single file may not simultaneously have both shared and exclusive locks.

Locks created by
.BR flock ()
are associated with an open file table entry.
This means that duplicate file descriptors (created by, for example,
.BR fork (2)
or
.BR dup (2))
refer to the same lock, and this lock may be modified
or released using any of these descriptors.
Furthermore, the lock is released either by an explicit
.B LOCK_UN
operation on any of these duplicate descriptors, or when all
such descriptors have been closed.

If a process uses
.BR open (2)
(or similar) to obtain more than one descriptor for the same file,
these descriptors are treated independently by
.BR flock ().
An attempt to lock the file using one of these file descriptors
may be denied by a lock that the calling process has
already placed via another descriptor.

A process may only hold one type of lock (shared or exclusive)
on a file.
Subsequent
.BR flock ()
calls on an already locked file will convert an existing lock to the new
lock mode.

Locks created by
.BR flock ()
are preserved across an
.BR execve (2).

A shared or exclusive lock can be placed on a file regardless of the
mode in which the file was opened.
.SH "RETURN VALUE"
On success, zero is returned.
On error, \-1 is returned, and
.I errno
is set appropriately.
.SH ERRORS
.TP
.B EBADF
.I fd
is not a not an open file descriptor.
.TP
.B EINTR
While waiting to acquire a lock, the call was interrupted by
delivery of a signal caught by a handler.
.TP
.B EINVAL
.I operation
is invalid.
.TP
.B ENOLCK
The kernel ran out of memory for allocating lock records.
.TP
.B EWOULDBLOCK
The file is locked and the
.B LOCK_NB
flag was selected.
.SH "CONFORMING TO"
4.4BSD (the
.BR flock (2)
call first appeared in 4.2BSD).
A version of
.BR flock (2),
possibly implemented in terms of
.BR fcntl (2),
appears on most Unix systems.
.SH NOTES
.BR flock (2)
does not lock files over NFS.
Use
.BR fcntl (2)
instead: that does work over NFS, given a sufficiently recent version of
Linux and a server which supports locking.
.PP
Since kernel 2.0,
.BR flock (2)
is implemented as a system call in its own right rather
than being emulated in the GNU C library as a call to
.BR fcntl (2).
This yields true BSD semantics:
there is no interaction between the types of lock
placed by
.BR flock (2)
and
.BR fcntl (2),
and
.BR flock (2)
does not detect deadlock.
.PP
.BR flock (2)
places advisory locks only; given suitable permissions on a file,
a process is free to ignore the use of
.BR flock (2)
and perform I/O on the file.
.PP
.BR flock (2)
and
.BR fcntl (2)
locks have different semantics with respect to forked processes and
.BR dup (2).
On systems that implement
.BR flock ()
using
.BR fcntl (),
the semantics of
.BR flock ()
will be different from those described in this manual page.
.PP
Converting a lock
(shared to exclusive, or vice versa) is not guaranteed to be atomic:
the existing lock is first removed, and then a new lock is established.
Between these two steps,
a pending lock request by another process may be granted,
with the result that the conversion either blocks, or fails if
.B LOCK_NB
was specified.
(This is the original BSD behaviour,
and occurs on many other implementations.)
.\" Kernel 2.5.21 changed things a little: during lock conversion
.\" it is now the highest priority process that will get the lock -- mtk
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR close (2),
.BR dup (2),
.BR execve (2),
.BR fcntl (2),
.BR fork (2),
.BR open (2),
.BR lockf (3)

There are also
.I locks.txt
and
.I mandatory.txt
in
.IR /usr/src/linux/Documentation .