service; ps & grep help

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 11:09 +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> I would much rather keep a caretaker process around. If our concern is
> that the daemon dies, badly enough that it doesn't tidy up its pid
> file
> (probable if the daemon isn't responsible for the pidfile in the first
> place:-) then I like this:
> 
>   ( start daemon &
>     echo $! >/var/run/the-daemon.pid
>     wait
>     rm /var/run/the-daemon.pid
>   ) &
> 
> That way the pid file should get removed if the daemon dies. Unless
> something takes out the caretaker subshell (requires special effort,
> or a disaster:-) the pid file will be reliably removed.

Yes, that would work. Of course all this would be unnecessary if process
ids were nonces, i.e. never repeated during the lifetime of the system,
but that would be a pretty big change.

poc