Newbie question about locks...

Hi all,

I'm a newbie on this newsgroup, and i have some troubles with Postgres
7.0 on Linux. I am programming with libpq-c library to access a small
database. For one process, i have to lock a row before an update. I give
an "select * from xxx where yyy=zzzz for update" SQL command to lock the
row and it works well. But from an other app, when i try to update the
same row, the app seems to go into an infinite loop until i commit the
first transaction. It's OK for the data - the second app waits for the
first, but for the users it's not very nice. So, is there an option or a
command to know if a row is lock for an update ?

Thanks in advance for your answer(s).

regards,
BUTKIEWICZ jean-Francois
jean(dot)francois(dot)butkiewicz(at)acgcenter(dot)com