As earlier was pointed out, locks are only suggestion. Hence, other processes can over-ride your lock, so any processes that would be a problem for reading/writing at the wrong time, would have no respect for the lock. So the lock would have no effect anyway.

I still agree; however, that using locks are a good idea. Sometimes I don't feel they are necessary if it is a custom file that only that program will be accessing, and there can only be one instance of that program open at a time. Other than a situation like that it is a good idea to lock.

If you are on a system that doesn't support flock, you can implement your own simple locking system. You do this by testing for the presence of a lockfile before opening the data file, making a lock file when you read or write to a file, and then deleting it when you're done. The following code exemplifies a very simple locking implementation:

while( -f $LOCKFILE ) { ; }
open (LOCKME, "> $LOCKFILE") or die "The lockfile won't open $!";
open(CFILE, "count.txt" ) or die "The countfile won't open $!";    
read( CFILE, my $buf, -s CFILE );     
close( CFILE );         
unlink $LOCKFILE;
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~heise2k~