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Usage
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| trytouch flagfile |
| The trytouch program is a user command that was written for the specific purpose of working with boxenv lock files. It simply attempts to create a lockfile, and reports to Standard Output whether or not it was successful. |
| The output of the program is one line that contains simply the word "yes" if a lockfile is successfully created, and "no" if the lockfile was not successfully created. |
| The lockfile that is created has it's permissions set to read-only, so as to assure that future calls to run the trytouch program for that particular file will not be successful until the lockfile is removed. |
| Typically, the extention of a lockfile is ".lock", but the trytouch program does absolutely nothing to enforce this. |
| The original version of trytouch produced lockfiles that had no contents. However, currently trytouch produces lockfiles that have the contents of the dateelem program run in raw mode, so that janitorial programs will be able to determine if a lockfile is stale. To refer to a lockfile as "stale" is to say that it has been around so long that the process which created it has in all likelihood died and "forgotten" to erase it. |