Locks for exclusive access to resources

[Jussi Eloranta]

How can I lock a tape frive for example intelligently? (bsd 4.2)
Links are not usable int his case since all program won't check for that lock.
The only thing that I figured out was just to chown + chmod the
tape special files in /dev. But this surely contains some race conditions..
I also file locks (flock and lockf) since they are 'advisory' locks, besides
the fork would be a problem...

Does anyone know a bettert way to do this?

Jussi
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Jussi Eloranta               Internet(/Bitnet):
University of Jyvaskyla,     eloranta at tukki.jyu.fi
Finland                      [128.214.7.5]