I have just discovered that *nix systems have two completely unrelated APIs called "flock" and "lockf" and words cannot describe the rage that is boiling within me
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The different locking mechanisms came from different variants, and none was very good. I wrote a short report about them years ago, which I can't now find, but I suspect it concluded "they do too little and too much", rather like "volatile".
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AT&T had fcntl/F_*LCK, flock was BSD, lockf was originally UG something (Unix Group?), locking() was Xenix, probably others. They were all troublesome: eg, limit on number of record locks was common, since in kernel, and could be small (100?).
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Similar proliferation of variants with IPC, so you couldn't solve the problem by introducing your own monitor. System V IPC is still there. Why? Put it out of our misery.
End of conversation
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