int flock(int fd, int operation);
A call to flock() may block if an incompatible lock is held by another process. To make a non-blocking request, include LOCK_NB (by ORing) with any of the above operations.
A single file may not simultaneously have both shared and exclusive locks.
Locks created by flock() are associated with a file, or, more precisely, an open file table entry. This means that duplicate file descriptors (created by, for example, fork(2) or dup(2)) refer to the same lock, and this lock may be modified or released using any of these descriptors. Furthermore, the lock is released either by an explicit LOCK_UN operation on any of these duplicate descriptors, or when all such descriptors have been closed.
A process may only hold one type of lock (shared or exclusive) on a file. Subsequent flock() calls on an already locked file will convert an existing lock to the new lock mode.
Locks created by flock() are preserved across an execve(2).
A shared or exclusive lock can be placed on a file regardless of the mode in which the file was opened.
Since kernel 2.0, flock(2) is implemented as a system call in its own right rather than being emulated in the GNU C library as a call to fcntl(2). This yields true BSD semantics: there is no interaction between the types of lock placed by flock(2) and fcntl(2), and flock(2) does not detect deadlock.
flock(2) places advisory locks only; given suitable permissions on a file, a process is free to ignore the use of flock(2) and perform I/O on the file.
flock(2) and fcntl(2) locks have different semantics with respect to forked processes and dup(2).
There are also locks.txt and mandatory.txt in /usr/src/linux/Documentation.