Ensure a single instance of an application in Linux

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The Right Thing is advisory locking using flock(LOCK_EX); in Python, this is found in the fcntl module.

Unlike pidfiles, these locks are always automatically released when your process dies for any reason, have no race conditions exist relating to file deletion (as the file doesn’t need to be deleted to release the lock), and there’s no chance of a different process inheriting the PID and thus appearing to validate a stale lock.

If you want unclean shutdown detection, you can write a marker (such as your PID, for traditionalists) into the file after grabbing the lock, and then truncate the file to 0-byte status before a clean shutdown (while the lock is being held); thus, if the lock is not held and the file is non-empty, an unclean shutdown is indicated.

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