Is there a command to start and stop deamons running on a system? Specificly, I have a program that I've written to run in the background, and I don't know how to start it as a deamon. Thanks in advance for info!

I'm assuming that the daemon process that you have written follows the basic rules:

1) fork and exit the parent
2) setsid()
3) chdir("/")
4) umask(0)

Once you program is written you can start it like any other process and it will disassociate itself from the controlling terminal. To kill it use 'kill'.

If you want to get fancy, you can write a script that will take start or stop as a parameter. If passed start it could start the process and the daemon could log its pid to a file. When stop was called it could call kill on the daemon's pid.

Gary

That fixed it. I was missing the setsid and umask functions.