What practical applications can be considered for the trylock function in PHP?

The trylock function in PHP can be used to prevent race conditions when multiple processes are trying to access a shared resource concurrently. By using trylock, a process can attempt to acquire a lock on the resource and proceed only if the lock is successfully obtained, otherwise it can handle the situation gracefully without causing deadlock.

$lock = sem_get(1234, 1, 0666, 1); // Create a semaphore
if (sem_acquire($lock, true)) { // Try to acquire the lock
    // Critical section - access the shared resource
    sem_release($lock); // Release the lock
} else {
    // Handle the situation where the lock couldn't be acquired
    echo "Failed to acquire lock";
}