Here's a couple of tricks I worked up for using fetchmail and signify as daemons. Put these in your .login or .profile .
First, I wanted to make sure fetchmail was running; answer, just run it from the .login, right? But I didn't want to bitch about "waking up" to grab mail that it was going to get in the next five minutes anyway. So we use the handy, dandy pidof command: /sbin/pidof /usr/bin/fetchmail >& /dev/null || fetchmail --daemon 300 Secondly, I like to have a rotating signature file. Signify is a pretty good tool but it has two shortcomings that make the scenario a little more complicated -- 1) it's a perl script, so pidof doesn't work (it matches "perl", not "/usr/bin/signify" and 2) it doesn't nicely put itself in the background like fetchmail does. The advantage is that it kindly sticks a PID file in your home directory for you. So... test -f $HOME/.signature.lock && ps `cat $HOME/.signature.lock` >& /dev/null \ || (signify --fifo=$HOME/.signature &) The fetchmail solution is a little weak, in that if more than one user is fetching mail the pidof command will return pid's for all of them, so fetchmail would fail to get started for you if anyone else was using. In practice, only one user (me) fetches mail on my machine. If more are going to do it, fetchmail should probably be run by root anyway. I tried to implement these solutions using the start-stop-daemon, but I encountered a number of difficulties with that approach, not the least of which was that the "--help" option lied to me; if you give start-stop-daemon an option it doesn't recognize, it dies instead of passing on those options to the daemon you're calling (with --exec). Oh well. Elegant improvements on these solutions would be most welcome, particularly the fetchmail one (how do we determine if a particular user has a running fetchmail process without doing an ugly grep/awk through the output of ps?). Also, a design goal for me was to make sure these guys do their work dead quiet. If the processes are dead, start them silently. If they're already running, don't whine. Somebody ought to put up a "Debian Tips and Tricks" webpage that features stuff like the above (hopefully neater things, though). -- G. Branden Robinson | Purdue University | If encryption is outlawed, only outlaws [EMAIL PROTECTED] | will @goH7OjBd7*dnfk=<q4fDj]Kz?. http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ | -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
