This is a hypothetical scenario. Say that I have a particular folder that is being synchronized by a process which is receiving a files/folders via the internet. Now while this operation is in progress, for the synchronizer's sake, there should be no cp operations to its directory. Anyway this can be acheived?
anyway to fail/delay a cp process?
cp;synchronization
Your synchronizer is writing to the directory rather than reading, right?  So taking a filesystem snapshot or setting the immutable bit is out.If you're running the synchronizer as root, you can change the ownership of the directory to root and the permissions to 700 (rwx------; only owner can do anything).  This will keep out any new processes not running as root, but any process that already has a file or subdirectory open will still be able to make changes.On Linux, if you want to find all processes that have currently files open in your tree, you can do lsof +D my_directory.  What you do with that knowledge, though, depends on the situation.