This may be a stupid question, but I was just wondering if this is possible:

I know that running a program as a "service" is much different in windows than in linux. As far as I know (which is very little), linux doesn't see programs as a service. They're either running or they're not. Some programs run in the background and others run interactively for the user.

I have a Mandrake 8.2 web/database/file server that is handling the company's web site. I have a program that needs to run as a service. I want to set it up so I can control it from the command line like "service progname start" and it will run in the background. It doesn't need to be run all the time, and only needs running when we need it.

I know I can do "service dhcpd start" and the dhcp daemon will start. That's what I want to do with this program. If I'm not mistaken, there is a file somewhere and you just put a start {} and stop {} section in....?? But I don't remember much. I'm not sure.

Any suggestions or ideas would be great. Thanks ahead of time.

generally it's seldom worth going to all the effort of a service script, it's not really necessary...

load program in background:

progname &

stop program

kill (pidnumber)
or
killall programname

should be all you really need... BUT you can hack an existing script around to do that kind of thing for you, you've got plenty of example in /etc/init.d, and once you've customized one to suit you you should be able to run it like any other service

one thing to note there, starting the prog/service with nohup often helps with backrounding issues.

nohup ./progname &