> As far as I know, there is no portable way to safely create
> lock files in a world-writable directory from a bourne-shell script.
I have done this by creating directories instead of files: only one mkdir
will complete. You can also create a pid-specific file and then ln it to the
common lockfile - only one ln will complete (without the -f flag).
I'm not sure if ln is save over NFS, but I beleive that mkdir is.
Eric B.