Irregular problem with cron /etc/init.d/exim restart.

[Adam Funk <a24061@yahoo.com>]

My root crontab includes this line:

01         01    * * *      /etc/init.d/exim restart ; ps aux |grep exim

which I think ought to produce some output every morning.  Only on rare
occasions, however, do I get an e-mail from this job (everything else
that cron should e-mail me works) -- and when I do it looks like this:

Stopping EXIM.
Starting EXIM.
root      6978  0.2  0.1  4448 1188 ?        S    01:01   0:00 /bin/sh
-c /etc/init.d/exim restart ; ps aux |grep exim
root      6985  0.0  0.1  4448 1188 ?        R    01:01   0:00 /bin/sh
-c /etc/init.d/exim restart ; ps aux |grep exim

and I find that the exim daemon is NOT running (i.e. has been stopped
but not restarted).  The /etc/init.d/exim script is as follows:

#!/bin/sh
[ -x /usr/local/exim/bin/exim -a -f /etc/exim-af/exim.conf ] || exit 0

PATH=/sbin:/bin
#FLAGS="defaults 23"
case "$1" in
        start)
                echo -n "Starting EXIM"
                start-stop-daemon --start --quiet
--exec /usr/local/exim/bin/exim -- -bd
                echo "."
                ;;
        stop)
                echo -n "Stopping EXIM"
                start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet
--exec /usr/local/exim/bin/exim
                echo "."
                ;;
        restart|force-reload)
                echo -n "Stopping EXIM"
                start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet
--exec /usr/local/exim/bin/exim
                echo "."
                sleep 5
                echo -n "Starting EXIM"
                start-stop-daemon --start --quiet
--exec /usr/local/exim/bin/exim -- -bd
                echo "."
                ;;
        *)
                echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/exim {start|stop|restart
force-reload}"
                exit 1
                ;;
esac
exit 0


Whenever I run this from a console, it works fine.  It plays up only
occasionally from cron.  Any suggestions?