rc scripts: how to start a process that doesn't daemonize itself?

Robert Watson rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Wed Oct 19 18:49:25 PDT 2005


On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Marco Molteni wrote:

>> Try putting the "&" in command_args; that way it'll only be used during 
>> startup.  I do that in some of my homegrown rc.d scripts.  A (probably 
>> cleaner) way is to set
>>
>> start_cmd="/usr/sbin/daemon /usr/local/bin/myprog"
>
> thanks to you and the others posters for the & trick.
>
> It works, but as you say it smells hackish. For one, it doesn't detach 
> from the controlling tty. Not a big deal when run from init I think, but 
> it may make a difference when run multiuser from a terminal (say myprog 
> forcestart).
>
> anyway, better than nothing ;-)

The daemon(8) page claims it detaches from the tty.  You may also want to 
use the -f argument to redirect stdio.  If it isn't working properly, 
please file a PR, thanks!

Robert N M Watson


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