I am trying to find a way to check the current status of a file. Such as some cron job processes are dependent on the completion of others. if a file is currently being accessed / modified or simply open state I will wait until it is done being processed before attempting the next process on that file. Mainly the final process that zips previous days files up. I want to hold off archiving the previous days file until it is no longer being accessed.

thanks!

If you know the file name, try either lsof or fuser.
They return information about open files, and if it is open.

Thanks Jim.

I was kink of hoping there was something like a conditional switch or something like that. i.e. -f , -c ...

but this is good I will try this. the only thing is sometimes the admins are for some reason reluctant to put some of these neat Unix utilities on the machine.

The reason is you need privs -superuser - to run fuser.