RedHat startup scripts

[Bill Nottingham]

Paul Nasrat (pnasrat at redhat.com) said: 
> > It seems to me that they could be made much more usable, complaints:
> > 
> > * daemon, takes a --user argument, great I don't want them to run as root.
> > 
> >   These are simple perl & shell scripts, I want them to run as daemons, but
> >   there isn't a --daemon option, I shall need to modify them to fork and
> >   have the parent die & child continue. Not hugely difficult, but would be nice.

This could be useful. If we did this, I'd be tempted to rewrite daemon() in
C, so it could easily go in the background, close files, etc.

> > * killproc - this looks for a xxx.pid file in /var/run, unfortunately /var/run
> >   is only writable by root, so the processes started by daemon can't write there,
> >   (remember: they are not setuid root).
> >   OK: lots of programs have this problem and so have a pid file in a directory
> >   that is writable by them .... but killproc only looks in /var/run, no options
> >   for anything else.

This is fixed in the current FC6 development tree - killproc takes a -p <pidfile>
option.

> > * daemon has an option --check that allows you to set a different basename when
> >   generating the .pid file, that is nice since my perl scripts are FooBar.pl
> >   You would have thought that killproc would have had the same option -- no,
> >   not that nice.

Does the '-p' option above solve this for you?

Bill