Thionyl chloride in an aprotic solvent should work. Quench a sample of the reaction mix in an alcohol to form the ester. Do TLC of the quenched sample. The ester and acid should be easy to separate by TLC.
I used the oxalyl chloride method for many years - it never failed me.
Thionyl chloride, however, is more cost-effective for large scale reactions. Word of warning: avoid toluene as the solvent, because it can be chlorinated by thionyl chloride. The resulting benzyl chloride is an unpleasant contaminant at large scale.
When I was an active chemist, I used thionyl chloride for this reaction. The advantage is that the two by-products of this reaction, namely, hydrochloric acid and sulphur dioxide, are in gaseous form and hence no extra effort is required to remove them from the reaction mixture.
The disadvantage is removal of residual amount of thionyl chloride from the reaction pot. For this couple of times addition of a suitable solvent and removal by distillation is required to be done. This step for removal of excess thionyl chloride is required to be carried out in case your target molecule is an amide.
If I remember correctly, a major disadvantage of using oxalyl chloride is formation of carbon monoxide as a by-product, giving rise to safety issue.
In general, acyl chlorides are unstable and not isolated as a product. These class of compounds are made as an intermediate for the synthesis of the target molecule directly, avoiding the step of isolation of the acyl chloride.
Oxalyl chloride with catalytic Dimethyl formamide is industrial preferred safe reagent. Its by-product is CO2 and HCl and bothare gaseous in nature and get removed from reaction mixture easily. Though it is little costly to thionyl chloride.