Re: stopping and starting daemons...

["Kevin D. Colby" <kevin marcal com>]

Paul Brady wrote:
> 
> I am pretty familiar with UNIX but cannot figure out how to kill and
> restart the httpd daemon....or any other daemon for that matter....
> 
> I tried specifying the following:
> ps -a
> ps -ef
> 
> And then I planned to use kill -9 pid
> 
> But when I invoke ps -a or ps -ef, none of the running daemons show
> up....I'm confused...I could swear this is the way it used to work...
> 
> How do I determine which daemons are running and how to stop and then
> restart them (if I want to restart em)???

Try 'ps ax | grep httpd'.
The '-' is actually now deprecated for BSD style options,
but it would work too.

To restart _most_ daemons (not all will honor this, but httpd does
I _think_ and I know named and smbd do): 'kill -HUP <pid>'.

Most daemons interpret SIGHUP as a "reread all config files and restart
on the same pid".  Check the daemon's manpage if you want to be sure.

Beware that httpd actually runs several processes.  I think a SIGHUP
to the original one will do it, but you might want to kill the others
too.  (They'll come back if you leave one running.)

For a more smooth approach, try the scripts in /etc/rc.d/init.d/
'./httpd restart' should do it, but if in doubt, './httpd stop'
and then './httpd start'.

	- Kevin Colby
	  kevin marcal com