I am currently launching fetchmail on a machine on which I normally log in locally. Originally, I put the command to launch the daemon in my ~/.bashrc file, but once I realized that every time I launched another terminal window it was running another copy of the daemon, I tried to figure out where to put it so it would only be launched once when I logged in. I settled on ~/.bashrc_profile. Locally, this seems to work just fine.

The problem is, if I log on to this machine from elsewhere, it starts up another copy of the daemon.

How do I set this up so it only launches the fetchmail daemon when I'm logged on locally, and only once, because presumably I could log on multiple times locally and I still don't want multiple daemons running.

Thanks.

What I do is put it in the booscripts.... but that might not work for your situation.

EDIT:

you might also be able to incorperate some kind of check to see if fetchmail is running before starting the daemon.... maybe something like (psudo):

if
ps -e | grep fetchmail = no
then start
else
don't start

p.s.- I went psudo b/c I can't think of how to do it correctly :-)

ooh, I just got another idea! If you have it in you ~/.bashrc or something, when you start it up, also do a "touch ~/.fetchmail_is_running" ... kindof like your own lock file. then you can check if that is there, so you don't have to deal with the "ps" command. then, in you ~/.bash_logout file you can put something like "rm ~/.fetchmail_is_running"

maybe something like this:
in ~/.bash_profile:

if [ ! -e ~/.fetchmail_is_on ] ; then
sendmail -k
touch /root/.fetchmail_is_on
fi

then in ~/.bash_logout :

rm ~/.fetchmail_is_on

try that out... it should do the job


EDIT:

just another thought....

you might want to put that file in a world readable place, or /tmp or something, then put the script to delete it in /etc/rc.d/rc6.d/ named K05rm_fetchmail_is_on (don't forget to make it executable)

this way, if you log on then log off, the file won't be deleted...

good luck

-Adam

Cool idea. I thought of one problem though. If there's a power failure, the file would prevent restarting fetchmail until I removed it by hand.

I think your other idea of doing a ps -A | grep fetchmail is going to work. I am trying to figure out how to get bash to evaluate and test the return of that command now.

Thanks.

Hey, your idea works great! Here's what I used:

if [ -z "$(ps -A | grep fetchmail)" ]; then
/usr/bin/fetchmail
fi

Thanks

hi jkcunningham & all!

you suggest:

if [ -z "$(ps -A | grep fetchmail)" ]; then
/usr/bin/fetchmail
fi

I think "-z str" delivers the value true if the length of str is equal to zero!!

right?

how should this string equal zero. I receive following when I check for "ps -ef | grep fetchmail":
realos 4273 1 0 01:14 ? 00:00:01 /usr/bin/fetchmail -d 180

As you see it is not zero. Am I doing some silly mistake?

thanks,

It looks like your fetchmail is running in daemon mode ( -d 180 ... It's checking your mail every 180 seconds), so it will stay in the background.

yes, that `s true but I started it manually. My question was about that "z" as an option. do you know why it should be there?

The z is there because jkcunningham wanted to test if fetchmail was running on his system.

the stuff inside the [ ]'s is tested, and if it is returned true, then fetchmail will be run. The -z returns true if the "ps -A | grep fetchmail" doesn't return anything... that is... the string is empty.

ps -A | grep init

and

ps -A | grep someprog

the first one will return a string, which means that the -z will make the test return false, while the second one will return nothing, and the -z will make the test return true

You probably have a fetchmailrc file that tells it to start up in daemon mode.

here's more on test commands:

http://yz.kiev.ua/www/etc/bash.html