Goldilock - parent process id based concurrency barrier

goldilock is a PID lock-file based mutex that can be used to manage access to shared ressources by blocking access until an exclusive lock can be aquired. The PID written to the lock file is the PID of the parent process of goldilock.

• a lock is acquired by goldilock <path to lockfile> --acquire
  • goldilock returns as soon as the lock could be acquired and spin waits otherwise.
• a lock can be released manually by goldilock <path to lockfile> --release (but only by the if executed in the as a child of the same matched parent process)
• a lock is considered expired when the PID that acquired the lock is no longer a running process
• goldilock can search in the parent process acquiring the lock by name (using goldilock ... -s process_name1,process_name2 argument). The furthest matching parent is used unless --nearest is enabled
• goldilock is reentrant by parent process id (e.g. one same parent process can pass the barrier many times as long as it holds the lock)
• the order of locking depends on the OS scheduler

> goldilock --help
goldilock - parent process id based concurrency barrier
Usage:
  goldilock [OPTION...] positional parameters

  -v, --verbose            Verbose output
  -h, --help               Print usage
      --acquire            Try to acquire the lock
      --release            Try to release the lock
  -s, --search_parent arg  Search locking parent process by name (comma
                           separate list e.g. name1,name2,name3). If
                           unspecified immediate parent process of
                           goldilock is used. By default the farthest
                           parent process matching the search term is
                           selected.
  -n, --nearest            If -s is enabled, search for the nearest parent
                           matching the search

Building

Build using tipi (substitute the toolchain your platform of choice e.g. windows-cxx17 or vs-16-2019-win64-cxx17 etc...)

tipi . -t linux-cxx17

... or by using the provided cmake build system:

mkdir cmake_build
cd cmake_build
cmake ..
cmake --build .

License

goldilock is available under a proprietary license or subject to GPLv2 licence as per your choice. Please contact tipi technologies Ltd. for commercial options.