I am writing a script to do some apt
commands, but I am running into potential issues of the apt/dpkg
databases being locked so my script bails. I want to check the lock files (i.e. /var/lib/dpkg/lock
) before doing anything just like apt
does when it runs its command, but I can't figure out how apt
is performing the lock.
The lock file is always there, and apt-get
is not doing a flock on the file. How else would it be checking to see if it is in use? From an strace
I see that apt-get
opens the file, but that is it. In my script, I can open the file while apt-get
has it open as well.