I am writing a script to do some apt commands, but I am running into potential issues of the apt/dpkg databases being locked so my script bails. I want to check the lock files (i.e. /var/lib/dpkg/lock) before doing anything just like apt does when it runs it's command, but I can't figure out how apt is performing the lock.

The lock file is always there, and apt-get is not doing a flock on the file. How else would it be checking to see if it is in use? From an strace I see that apt-get opens the file, but that is it. In my script, I can open the file while apt-get has it open as well.