restart behavior (initscript)

Hello.

I have doubts about the behavior of the restart
action in the following scenarios:

(i)
The daemon (sshd in my case) is misconfigured, so
after stopping it, it will not (re)start.

  Can I check for the presence of this scenario and refuse
  to stop the service in the first place?


(ii)
When the daemon (sshd again) receives a SIGHUP, it spawns a
new copy of itself and kills the old parent process, but the
childs are kept alive.

  Since there's a new parent process (the one who accepts
  new connections), can I consider this the same of a
  restart?


So, should the spec of the restart action be interpreted
as a "start" followed by a "stop" or can I implement this
kind of behavior?

And is it possible to clear the spec in order to avoid this
kind of confusion? Or am I the only one interpreting the
spec this way? :)

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Ademar de Souza Reis Jr. <[email protected]>

^[:wq!