hur.st's bl.aagh

Wanting to hone my shell scripting skills a bit, I ended up reimplementing a cute script by Dustin Kirkland.

run-one is basically a thin wrapper around lockf(1), or on Linux flock(1):

-% lockf /var/tmp/sleep-5.lock sleep 5
# <runs sleep 5 under the named lock>
-% run-one sleep 5
# <runs sleep 5 under a lock named by a SHA256 of its arguments>

It also has some handy features like:

-% run-this-one sleep 30 &
-% run-this-one sleep 30 # kill the original
[1]  - exit 70    run-this-one sleep 30

While conceptually simple, there are some fiddly details I felt the original got wrong. Not least, it didn’t run under FreeBSD.

So, mine was born. I feel a bit cheeky giving it the same name, but I’ve done my best to reference the original frequently to limit confusion.