On Sun, 1 Feb 1998, Branden Robinson wrote: > 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
Hmm. I am using this piece of bash shell scripting to do the trick. I think yours uses less resources, but here is mine anyway: if ps -x | grep -v grep | grep -q fetchmail then : else fetchmail --daemon 1200 --syslog --all fi > 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. In my solution, this already works. > 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. Use "--" before the arguments you want to pass to the daemon. > 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?). Yes, it is ugly. But it works. > 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. Indeed. That's what we want. > Somebody ought to put up a "Debian Tips and Tricks" webpage that features > stuff like the above (hopefully neater things, though). Yes, please do so if there are enough of these tricks. Remco -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .