On 7/9/11, Kenneth Porter <shiva at sewingwitch.com> wrote: > I have a Bash script, currently run a couple times an hour from cron, that > pulls data from an old Windows DB by rsync, converts it to SQL, and injects > it into a MySQL DB for display in a LAMP-based app. (Make and Perl are also > involved to minimize the number of tables touched and to clean up the SQL > generated by Pxlib.) > > I'd like to add the ability to refresh the data immediately from the web > app, but I don't want it to trample on the periodic script and corrupt the > data. Offhand, I think checking for a lock file before starting is probably the easiest way to do it. That's what I do for scripts that are cronjobs but can also be initiated manually. However, this might not work if your web app is inserting/updating the data in MySQL directly rather than simply starting a new import process as I'm assuming.