What is POSIX's equivalent of Win32's Mutex?

POSIX's mutex is equivalent to Win32's CRITICAL_SECTION -- its scope is limited to a single process. Win32's mute开发者_StackOverflow中文版x (Actually called a "mutant" in NT land) serves as a cross process locking mechanism. What is pthreads' equivalent for cross-process locks?

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It's a pthread_mutex_t with a pshared attribute set to PTHREAD_PROCESS_SHARED . However, you're responsible to place such a mutex in shared memory, that all processes can access - so it's not as simple as the win32 api.

Perhaps closer to win32 is a posix or sysv semaphore. Traditionally, synchronization across processes has also been done using file locks e.g. flock or lockf (this is in no way as slow as it might sound)

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You should use IPC for cross-process operations: pipes, semaphores, message queues, or shared memory. I think in your case named semaphores would be fine. For more information:

man 7 sem_overview