und aus dem Chaos kam eine Stimme, und die Stimme sprach zu mir
"Lächle und sei fröhlich, denn es könnte schlimmer kommen."
und ich lächelte und war fröhlich
und es kam schlimmer.

Today was the first time that I ran into an unexpected race condition. With a bash script for a self made automounter. The automounter is invoked by udev. I did not expect udev to run the same script twice parallely, and so, an error occured.

The theoretical solution is simple, use locking. But in fact, I never have seen bash scripts doing something beyond

[ -e my_lock_file ] || touch my_lock_file && ...
to create locks, and this is dangerous, because between testing and touching a logfile, there might be the time for another test - the locking is not atomic.

I would have been surprised if this problem did not have a solution, and in fact, it does:

lockfile-create /tmp/my.lock
...
lockfile-remove /tmp/my.lock
Nice. Especially, it allows simple experiments with lockfiles through remote file systems.