> locking?  hmm...what am i missing...?
> 
> i always figured that if you
> 
>  (1) do all the moves and creation of new (empty) log files
>  (2) do all the hupping (syslogd, and others) [*]
>  (3) do all the gziping (bzip2ing?)
> 
> that there would be no need for locking.  or are you trying to guard
> against to instances of newsyslog running simultaneously not stepping
> on each other's toes?

Yes, trying to guard.

>    alias hup 'kill -HUP `head -1 /var/run/\!$.pid`'

FWIW newsyslog(8) does something functionally equivalent (in C).