Re: restarting a daemon

["Greg Wiley" <greg@orthogony.com>]

On Tuesday, September 25, 2001 11:48 AM, mickle@panix.com wrote:


> I am unable to determine how to HUP a daemon

Your doc is telling you that you can send the process a signal--in
this case a hangup or HUP--to ask it to reload its configuration.
The signal-sending program in unix is 'kill'.  So the command:

kill -HUP <processnumber>

will send the proper signal to the process with the given number.
There are several ways to find the process number.  A simple one
that usually works is to search the output of the ps command for
the process name.  In your case:

ps -Al | egrep 'exim'

will return ps report lines that contain the string 'exim'.  Substitute
the number in the 4th column--the PID field--for <processnumber>
in the kill command above (sometimes the "egrep 'exim'" command
itself will be returned in the report.  Don't use that line.).

If your daemon can be down for a few moments, you can simply
execute the command:

/etc/init.d/exim restart

Or, if that doesn't work (sometimes doesn't, don't know why),
issue two commands:

/etc/init.d/exim stop
/etc/init.d/exim start

Hope this helps.

Best,

  -=greg