C, but seems to have migrated to perl and other languages. I think it used to be a signal to the ancient "lint" program in C that it should shut up and not give you a warning. rint STDERR "Still locked.\n"; exit 0; Finally the very last part of the program exits and returns a success code. We only get here if we didn't manage to create the lockfile. It seems a little weird to return success in such a case, but it works: the primary use of runlock is in a cron job, and cron sends you annoying emails if the job returns non-zero. Since the fact that the previous run is still running is not considered an error, it works much better to return zero here. If you use cron2rss , your captured output will include the "Still locked" message anyway. Now that I've done a presentation at StartupCampWaterloo , which was recorded (presumably to show up on the Internet sometime), and I've been accepted to do it again at DemoCampGuelph8 next week, I guess the cat's out of the bag. EQL=Data is a project that we've been working on for a little while. The concept is simple: easy, one-click replication of your Microsoft Access databases between any users who have a copy of the same database file. Why Microsoft Access? Good question! Because: it's used by (at least) hundreds of thousands of people; to this day, it remains the easiest way in the world to create a