If you're only trying to coordinate among sub-processes of your top-level script (ones that are at some point forked from the root script and duplicate its file

If you're only trying to coordinate among sub-processes of your top-level script (ones that are at some point forked from the root script and duplicate its file descriptors), there's probably a way to get an approach similar to mine working, though I'd have to think a bit about exactly how to do so. Probably something along the lines of using a FIFO/pipe file in a similar way that I use a normal file in the original snippet. If you're trying to coordinate multiple invocations of the same script, you're out of luck trying to adapt my approach - something has to manage a resource for multiple unrelated processes, and thus they're all going to need a stable identifier of some sort to access it. There might be something mildly better than a filesystem-based lockfile, but it's almost certainly not worth the complexity/unfamiliarity to other people who might use your code. You're probably best off putting a file in a dedicated temporary directory like `/tmp` and relying on out-of-band cleanup to catch things like SIGKILL that will fall through the cracks of your normal cleanup.