Re: running a shell script in the init file

On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 12:07, Dylan Reinhardt wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 10:45:12 -0800 (PST), Dave doughnut Fogarty
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > One should, of course, keep in mind that "theDJBway" is just that.  It is
> > not the RedHat way.
> 
> True enough, and well worth pointing out.
> 
> 
> > If you start to head down the DJB path, you'll loose
> > a lot of help from a lot of people.
> 
> That's still a winning proposition if you also lose some of the
> difficulties that adherants to the "Red Hat Way" have learned to live
> with.  :-)
> 
> $.02, YMMV, etc,
> 
> Dylan

Thanks for all the responses--they were very helpful.  Since I'm
installing this for a client who has very little linux experience, but
does have funds to have purchased a license agreement, I have decided to
stick with the "Redhat" way.  More likely to get support if anything
happens in the future.

With that being said, I was able to successfully create the daemons I
needed.  Having done this I did come up with a couple of questions where
I was hoping to get clarification:

1.  Within the init scripts, after all the setup, the actual start
command (where the executable is) was always prefaced with the word
"daemon", like: daemon $INIT_PROG $INIT_OPTIONS  Does anyone know what
the word daemon is for?

2.  In all other scripts, the command is called without the & at the end
of the line.  Mine runs a perl script and a bash shell.  The bash shell
I was forced to put the & in so that the startup process didn't hang. 
Do most of the executables do this by default, and are therefore not
needed?  The perl script had a -detach option, so the & wasn't needed. 
Is that how most daemon programs run, or is there some other way that
I'm missing that forces the application to run in the background (not
hang when calling /etc/init.d/[app] start)?

Thanks for the help and the clarification on all this! 

Kevin Williams