/var/run/directory/

[Russell Coker]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 13:19, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > If you move to this new thing, do you do one dir per daemon? One
> > > per process? Something else?
> >
> > One per security context.  So have /var/run/sendmail for sendmail.pid and
> > sm-client.pid as they are both part of the sendmail service.
>
> Then there's really no good way for Joe Random Process to know
> that the pid for sm-client is in the sendmail dir.

There's absolutely no way for Joe Random Process to know that the pid for the 
second copy of /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail is named sm-client.pid!  If 
sm-client.pid was in the directory /var/run/sendmail then figuring out that 
the sendmail process is related to the /var/run/sendmail directory is not 
overly difficult.

I am not suggesting that we do anything new, I am merely suggesting that the 
practices of putting pid files in sub-directories as currently used by 
Quagga, mdadm, radiusd (*), and dovecot be extended for more daemons.  I 
think that your point about the difficulty for Joe Random Process in finding 
the pid file is a really good one and supports my case well.


(*)  The radiusd start script creates a sym-link /var/run/radiusd.pid which 
points to the real location.  This is a good idea, I would be happy 
if /var/run was filled with sym-links and directories containing the real 
files.

-- 
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