How does pants detect when other pants invocations are running?

there is a pants daemon that the pants client talks to

Are there any safety issues by having concurrent runs when you don’t use the daemon? The only cautions I’ve seen are about performance for cache look ups and build graph construction.

not sure, I’m thinking it ought to be safe.

It's possible that multiple runs that attempt to write to

dist

might step on each others' toes. There are some attempts to make some

dist

writes atomic, but it's not standardized or bulletproof.