Bug in Linux FLOCK (?)

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Bug in Linux FLOCK (?)

by Jason Ha » Wed, 02 Feb 1994 22:31:47

Hi,

Can someone point me to the developers of the FLOCK code for Linux?

Sendmail 8.6.x seems to have uncovered a * bug with flock which they
probably would like to know about :-)

Problem seen in >= 0.99pl14 (at least)

Cheers,

Jason

Top

1. flock() bug in Perl, Linux, or FreeBSD?

I have one acount on a Linux ISP, and another on FreeBSD. On
both systems, the straightforward C equivalent of the Perl
script below works exactly as expected: run 3 simultaneous
copies, and you get a nicely incremented counter, with mixed
pids, indicating that flock() is doing its job. The Perl
script itself, doing exactly the same thing, generates a list
of duplicated numbers, indicating that simultaneous reads are
being allowed. The perl code is calling flock(). It doesn't
matter if you replace the flock() operator with the syscall()
equivalent, it still fails, so I suspect the problem is with
the OS, but I'm surprised the behavior is identical between
Linux and BSD. Whose bug is it?

#!/usr/local/bin/perl5.001
#
# Expects 'counter' to be a file with one line, which
# is just an ASCII integer.

open(COUNTER, "+<counter") || die "open failed";

for (1..10) {
flock(COUNTER, 2) || die "lock failed";

seek(COUNTER, 0, 0); # read current count
chop($count = <COUNTER>);

print "$$: $count\n"; # display pid, count
++$count;

seek(COUNTER, 0, 0); # write incremented count
print COUNTER "$count\n";

flock(COUNTER, 8) || die "unlock failed";

close COUNTER;
exit 0;

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