I haven't found it in the core documentation, but there is a recipe in "Perl Cookbook" (recipe 7.25 in the second edition) called "lockarea" that dooes just this. It's not very portable (and isn't easier than its C counterpart), but works on Berkley-ish systems.

The Cookbook says, "This program, while included with Perl...". I didn't find it in the latest sources when looking for "lockarea". Does anyone else know where it is in the source, or when it was depricated if it's not there?

-- dug