Originally Posted by rowan

I never trusted scripts from different billers to update htaccess - AFAIK there's no portable way to lock a file in unix, which means that if they attempted to update at exactly the same time there's a good chance the file will be corrupted. I ended up having the biller scripts write to separate password files then another script to join them together. The generated htaccess file can still be corrupt if two billers update simultaneously, but a cron job entry will regenerate that file (properly) soon afterwards.