RedHat startup scripts

[Alain Williams <addw phcomp co uk>]

I had an hour to burn so I thought that I would try starting a couple of daemons
the ''proper'' way using the redhat startup functions, etc, that they use in their
scripts in /etc/init.d. The main functions are daemon & killproc.

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.

* 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.

* 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.

I would be happy to do this work, but would only do so if it is likely to be included
in the next version of Fedora/Redhat (assuming that my code quality is up to scratch).

-- 
Alain Williams
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd.
Linux Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/

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