How to open a device for exclusive access?

[John Abreau]

On Sun, July 15, 2007 1:12 pm, Ben Scott said:

>   I've often wondered why, after 30+ years of *nix, there's still no
> good way to handle locking/contention in the filesystem.  Linux, KDE,
> GNOME, etc., have shown that the *nix community is willing to jettison
> "Unix tradition" when there's an obvious gain to be had.  But it seems
> like file(ish) locking is one of the holdouts.
>

File locking is pretty basic stuff. Breaking with tradition on it would
mean a program won't work on BSD, Solaris, or other Unices. You'd need
a truly gigantic gain to offset that loss, and you'd still be at risk
if other programs that rely on traditional locking try to access the
resources you've locked in a Linux-only manner.

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