Today I updated spamassassin from 2.63 to 3.01 on a linux machine. My init script does not work anymore because when I kill spamd it creates five new processes. So, I cannot start the daemon again.Any help is appreciated. Here is the info.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# ps -ef|grep spam
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# spamd -d -x
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# ps -ef|grep spamd
root 13272 1 75 14:50 ? 00:00:03 /usr/bin/perl5.8.0 -T -w /usr/bin/spamd -d -x
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# kill -9 13272
have you tried being nice and sending a normal kill (SIGTERM) instead of a -9 (SIGKILL)?
kill -9 does not allow spamd any opportunity to clean up after itself. The OS just force-unloads the process by dropping it from the process list and marking all memory free and files closed. Any pending file io is left incomplete, and all children are left to their own devices. SA has no chance to notify it's children by using it's sigterm handler. You could even corrupt your bayes DB by using kill -9 on spamd.
You should never kill -9 any process without doing a regular kill first, except as a truly drastic measure for a severely dangerous out-of-control process which is going to take your whole system down if you don't stop it.
Kill -9 is NOT a good thing to use for general shutdown of processes, it's really only one step better than having to pull the power plug on the box.
