lockrun mit Homebrew, apk installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage

Befehle und Aliase

• lockrun

Projektgeschichte

The official Unixwiz.net page explains that lockrun was created in response to network-monitoring cron jobs that could run longer than their schedule interval. The tool was designed as a protective wrapper that checks whether another protected instance is already running before launching the requested command.

lockrun is distributed as portable C source code rather than through a hosted source repository. The official page documents building it with `gcc lockrun.c -o lockrun` and installing it into `/usr/local/bin`.

Adoptionsgeschichte

The tool's natural audience is Unix administrators with cron jobs that must not overlap, especially polling and monitoring jobs. It was tested on FreeBSD and Linux, received a report of working on Mac OS X, and later gained portability work such as Solaris `lockf()` support.

Homebrew and Alpine packaging made the small C utility easier to install without manually downloading and compiling the source file.

Wie es verwendet wird

A typical crontab entry invokes `lockrun --lockfile=/var/run/name.lockrun -- command`. If the lock cannot be acquired, lockrun exits instead of launching a second copy; `--wait`, `--quiet`, `--verbose`, and `--maxtime` adjust behavior.

The official documentation warns that the lockfile should be placed in a directory protected from other users and not in `/tmp`, because a writable directory could enable symlink attacks against the lockfile path.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

lockrun is package-manager-relevant because it solves a narrow operations problem with one C file and no daemon. It overlaps with `flock(1)` patterns, but its documented cron-oriented interface made it a remembered admin tool.

Its packaging story is also a reminder that not every useful Unix package has a modern VCS repository; sometimes the authoritative upstream is a source file and a carefully written HTML manual.

Zeitleiste

• 2006: Initial lockrun release.
• 2009: Solaris 10 `lockf()` support was added.
• 2010: `--quiet` parameter was added.
• 2012: Documentation about no kill option, `--retries`, and `setsid()` support were added.

Related projects

• flock(1), run-one, and daemon supervisors solve adjacent locking or single-instance execution problems.
• Cacti poller scripts are used in the official documentation as a motivating cron example.

Quellen

• http://unixwiz.net/tools/
• http://unixwiz.net/tools/lockrun.html