Another system uses FTP to drop files in a directory for me to process. I have a bash script to process the incoming files. The script is started by cron periodically. There's a problem if the FTP transfer is still in progress because the process begins reading the file even though it isn't complete yet. From a bash script, is there a way to tell if the file is still being written to? I was looking at the lsof command, which will tell me if the file is opened or not, so that's a possibility... but it sure seems awkward for the task. I could also configure the ftp server to lock files being written, but that seems to be discouraged. (based on man vsftpd.conf) Basically, what I want is something like Can I get an exclusive read on file x? No - skip that file, go onto the next one Yes - start processing that file (I'm not concerned about the possible race condition there... I have other protections for that) Thanks for any suggestions...