[CentOS] best way to start and shutdown programs in CentOS?

Mon Nov 22 20:04:04 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 11/22/2010 1:37 PM, Kill Script wrote:
>
>
>     It may be tempting to use the rc.local, but that's the quick and dirty
>     way and not good for the long-term sustainability and management of a
>     system.  There's no way to individually control any service running
>     from there, and no way to stop it on shutdown.
>
>
> Yeah, thank you.  I talked with the person who wrote the Java program,
> and he essentially said the same thing.
>
> I'm looking through his suggestions now, and he suggested a shutdown
> script. I others who have examples with pid.txt and "dirname $0".  Not
> sure what these are and am googling them now.

Standard init scripts use some common functions to write the process ID 
of the running program in a standard place so the 'stop' operation can 
find it.  A side effect of this is that if you have multiple instances 
of a program running you have to have separate init scripts with 
different names to control them.   Also, you generally need root access 
to start/stop with this facility.  If your program doesn't otherwise 
need root access and you want an ordinary user to have control you may 
want to do it some other way.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com