Problem stopping a program

[Paul Schmehl]

I'm working on a new port that uses a tcl script in daemon mode.  I've 
written an rc.d script to start and stop the daemon, and I'm having a 
problem stopping the daemon.  If I do it immediately, it stops just fine, 
but if I leave the daemon running for a while, I cannot.  (The daemon 
spawns two child processes after it's started.)

Here's an example:  /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sguild.sh restart
Stopping sguild
Waiting for PIDS: 4554 4558 4559, 4554 4558 4559, 4554 4558 4559, 4554 4558 
4559, 4554 4558 4559, 4554 4558 4559, 4554 4558 4559, 4554 4558 4559, 4554 
4558 4559, 4554 4558 4559, 4554 4558 4559, 4554 4558 4559, 4554 4558 4559, 
4554 4558 4559,

This will go on indefinitely.  If I kill the process and then try 
restarting again, the child processes are gone, but the parent process is 
not.

 bash-2.05b# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sguild.sh restart
Stopping sguild
Waiting for PIDS: 4554, 4554, 4554^C
bash-2.05b# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sguild.sh restart
Stopping sguild
Waiting for PIDS: 4554, 4554^C

However, if I kill the (rc.d) process and then try to kill the daemon from 
the cli, it dies immediately.

bash-2.05b# ps -auxw | grep sguild
root     4554  0.0  0.7  3636 2744  p0- I    11:21PM   0:00.08 
/usr/local/bin/tclsh8.4 /usr/local/bin/sguild -D -c /usr/local/etc/s
root    34417  0.0  0.2  1408  732  p0  R+    2:20AM   0:00.00 grep sguild
bash-2.05b# kill -9 4554
bash-2.05b# ps -auxw | grep sguild
root    34419  0.0  0.1  1408  568  p0  R+    2:20AM   0:00.00 grep sguild

Here's the stop_cmd section of the script.  (I had to write this because 
the standard rc.d script couldn't find the process because the cli is 
/usr/local/bin/tclsh8.4 /usr/local/bin/sguild.)

sguild_stop() {
  if [ -z "${pids}" ]; then
    echo "${name} not running?"
  else
    echo "Stopping ${name}"
    kill -${sig_stop:-TERM} ${pids}
    wait_for_pids ${pids}
  fi
}

I've tried using KILL instead of TERM, but it doesn't make any difference. 
Any idea what's wrong?

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
University of Texas at Dallas
AVIEN Founding Member
http://www.utdallas.edu/