Michael Torrie wrote:
No, indeed the recommended procedure for portably deamonizing a server is to use the double fork. I'm not sure of all the reasons, but it is in the examples I've seen and I've used that method myself.
To answer my own question after some research and consulting with local experts Byron Clark and Michael Torrie: if I were on a decent linux distro, I would use start-stop-daemon, but since most RHEL 3 and 4 installs don't have it by default, I'm stuck with the daemon() bash function, which doesn't do auto-daemonization of executables. I had to add a "--daemon" argument to my executable, and use the daemon(int,int) function on Linux (#include <unistd.h>) to go into the background. This saves me the hassle of all the double fork, setsid(), and close() business. Works great.
--Dave /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
