Pass multiple commands to flock

flock -x -w 5 ~/counter.txt 'COUNTER=$(cat ~/counter.txt); echo $((COUNTER + 1)) > ~/counter.txt' How would I pass multiple commands to flock as in the example above? As far as I understand, flock takes different flags (-x for exclusive, -w for timeout), then the file to lock, and then the command to run. I'm not sure how I would pass two commands into this function (set variable with locked file's contents, and then increment this file). My goal here is to create a somewhat atomic increment for a file by locking it each time a script tries to access the counter.txt file.