I suggest you rethink your assumptions:

• What if you have not 4 but 400 containers?
• What if they are on servers not sharing a file system?

The clean way to do this is to write a very basic server (if the load allows it, this can be nginx+PHP and be done in 10 minutes) that does the file writing, run this in another container and connect to it from the other containers. This will give you:

• file locking easy and reliable, as the file is seen only by one server
• scalability
• clusterability
• abstraction

Try File lock api to implement this. Demo in Java.

public void modifyFile() {

    try {
        File file = new File("/tmp/fileToLock.dat");

        // Creates a random access file stream to read from, and optionally to write to
        FileChannel channel = new RandomAccessFile(file, "rw").getChannel();

        // Acquire an exclusive lock on this channel's file (blocks until lock can be retrieved)
        FileLock lock = null;

        // Attempts to acquire an exclusive lock on this channel's file (returns null or throws
        // an exception if the file is already locked.
        try {
            lock = channel.tryLock();
            if (null != lock) {
                List<String> fileToString = FileUtils.readLines(file, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
                long l = 0l;
                if (null != fileToString && fileToString.size() > 0) {
                    l = Long.valueOf(fileToString.get(fileToString.size() - 1));
                }
                l++;
                FileUtils.writeStringToFile(file, String.valueOf(l) + "\r\n", StandardCharsets.UTF_8, true);
            }
        } catch (OverlappingFileLockException e) {
            // thrown when an attempt is made to acquire a lock on a a file that overlaps
            // a region already locked by the same JVM or when another thread is already
            // waiting to lock an overlapping region of the same file
            System.out.println("Overlapping File Lock Error: " + e.getMessage());
            channel.close();
        }

        // release the lock
        if (null != lock) {
            lock.release();
        }
        // close the channel
        channel.close();

    } catch (IOException e) {
        System.out.println("I/O Error: " + e.getMessage());
    }

}