Re: [CentOS] Restarting a Perl-script (socket daemon) from /etc/inittab

On 6/2/2011 2:46 PM, Alexander Farber wrote:

The Perl server poll()s TCP-sockets and forks only once - at the startup by calling this method:

 sub daemonize {
     die "Can not fork: $!\n" unless defined (my $child = fork());
     # the parent should die
     exit 0 if $child;

[....]

Since I'm tired of restarting the server manually, I've tried to add it to the /etc/inittab:

 pref:3:respawn:/bin/su -c '/usr/local/pref/pref.pl' nobody

(and I've added a nightly cronjob to "pkill pref.pl" in the hope to refresh perl this way).

Unfortunately this does not work as expected - in the /var/log/messages I see that the script is being started again and again every 5 mins:

 Jun  2 18:55:56 myhost init: Id "pref"
 respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

What am I doing wrong here?

It needs to not fork/exit on its own if you want init to respawn when it exits.