Fetchmail seems to silently fail when I use the --pidfile option

Hello,
I've used fetchmail for a couple years, as a way of pulling emails into 
the Request Tracker ticket system I set up for my work. I'm trying to 
better automate it, by setting it up with Monit. To do that, I want to 
use the --pidfile option when starting or quitting fetchmail, which I've 
not tried before.

First, the details. I'm on Debian 8, with fetchmail 6.3.26. I installed 
this from Debian's package manager; I didn't compile any source. I know 
Debian 8 is outdated, but we're stuck on this server for a while for 
various reasons. The server reports that this is the most recent version 
of fetchmail it can find.

In the past, I'd start fetchmail manually (this is part of what I want 
to automate with Monit). I use this command:
sudo -u rt-user fetchmail -f /path/rt4/fetchmailrc

To let Monit have a known pid file to monitor, I tried this command:
sudo -u rt-user fetchmail -f /path/rt4/fetchmailrc --pidfile 
/var/run/rt_fetchmail.pid

When I run that command in the terminal, nothing at all happens. I get 
no output, /var/run/rt_fetchmail.pid is not created, and fetchmail 
doesn't seem to run. I should say here that the fetchmailrc file being 
used commands fetchmail to start as a daemon. If I leave off the 
--pidfile bit, the daemon starts as expected. I can then
sudo -u rt-user fetchmail --quit
to kill it. Running that quit command after using the --pidfile variant 
produces no output.

It seems like the --pidfile option causes a silent failure, but I can't 
figure out what's going on. The log only shows normal mail managing 
stuff, with no errors that I've found, and the terminal has no output 
whatsoever.

I've found nothing online about this problem, so am not sure where else 
to turn. If anyone on this list has ideas, I'd love to hear them. If 
I've left out any important information, let me know. Thanks for any help.


--

Alex Hall

[email protected]