UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

why don't you try it in a standalone script as suggested and see what happens...

the fuser script works, sort of, I put it into my script, I start one instance of the program and it appears to work fine but it never finishes, it just hangs on the last step of the prog, if I start another process while that one is running, the fuser script surely tells me one is already in progress and kicks me out, can you think of anything in the fuser script that may be causing the hang up?

sounds like it's got nothing to do with the 'fuser' logic, but rather with the rest of the script.

Can you post your script?

May be you could try this :

You could create a temporary zero byte lockfile and check for its existence every time before you run the script.If the file exists you can give a sleep command to wait for some time before checking again or exit.
You could remove this file just before your script ends its execution.

regards,
Srikanth

yes, that was the easiest way to accomplish this task, I created a file when my script began processing and removed it before the script exited, then I just put a check in to see if the file was created or not, that was a very simple approach, thank you. fyi, the fuser script also worked fine, apparently the problem was with the database I was accessing and not my script or the fuser program. I will keep that on the side as it is ver specific to process info and could be very useful. Thanks for all your help!

If you are using a touch file, you should make sure you have an appropriate trap for signals to make sure that file is removed if it ended by a signal, otherwise you may end up with a script which does not run as you want.