Re: looking for replacement for run (because of critical bug in

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

On Sat, Dec 23, 2000 at 06:46:46PM +0000, Marc Haber wrote:

> On Sat, 23 Dec 2000 09:14:25 +0100, Andreas Fuchs <asf@acm.org> wrote:
> >start-stop-daemon won't work,
> 
> start-stop-daemon IIRC needs $program to background itself, and it
> can't IIRC restart dying processes. run stays around to keep a watch
> on its child.

Yes and no.  It can daemonize a program, but will not restart it when it dies.
It sounds like what you want is a simple shell script that would be daemonized
by start-stop-daemon:

/usr/sbin/myprogram.wrapper:
#!/bin/sh

while true; do
  myprogram
  # Prevent excessive resource consumption if myprogram exits immediately
  sleep 5 
done

/etc/init.d/myprogram:
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/usr/sbin/myprogram.wrapper
NAME=myprogram
DESC="myprogram"

test -f $DAEMON || exit 0

set -e

case "$1" in
  start)
        echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --background --make-pidfile \
                --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  stop)
        echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
                --exec $DAEMON
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  restart|force-reload)
        #
        #       If the "reload" option is implemented, move the "force-reload"
        #       option to the "reload" entry above. If not, "force-reload" is
        #       just the same as "restart".
        #
        echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --background --make-pidfile
		--pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON
        sleep 1
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  *)
        N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
        # echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload}" >&2
        echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|force-reload}" >&2
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

exit 0

However, I would say that if the program dies so frequently that it needs a
wrapper like this, it should probably be fixed.

> >I wonder if a sh script could do what Marc described...
> 
> You'd have to have a ton of precautions. The task at hand seems
> trivial, but it isn't :-(

init does a good job of this; if there were an easy, error-proof way to add
entries to inittab (i.e., without editing the file in your maintainer scripts),
using init's 'respawn' mode might not be a bad idea.

-- 
 - mdz