Hello Everyone and thanks in advance,

I am very frustrated. I am a newcomer to the Linux software development world, and I am trying to find out how to develop an application that will run as a service or daemon.

I can google hundreds of examples and etc. on how to do this for Windows but not Linux. Now before someone bends me over and states that this request is non-sensical and not necessary for Linux because you can write a shell script to accomplish the same task, please explain to me how my running application receives various events from the OS and knows when to cleanup open resources, communicate with other running apps, etc. when Linux is shutting down.

I understand how this mechanism works in Windows, and that there are API's, callbacks, etc. that I can use to receive start, stop, pause, barf events from the OS when something occurs.

Executing a kill command or running a kill script on shutdown does not seem graceful to me and some enlightenment on how Linux runs services or etc. Would be great.

What do I need to do?

Start my application on startup.
Yes it listens for TCP requests and does something with them.
Yes it communicates with other processes and servers.
It needs to know when the OS is going down, notify peer systems, close files, lower the toilet seat and flush.
When the system boots back up, everything is peachy.

Again, sorry for asking this seamingly FAQ based question, if you do not have time for a detailed explanation, please send me a URL, recommendation for a book, or something else.

Thank you for your assistance.

William Lee Mapp, III

this ought to help: http://www.gnu.org/manual/glibc-2.2....-Handling.html

im assuming c/c++ though

You have a pretty complex list of requirements. [list=1][*]Startup the application from the Linux startup scripts. This will differ with different flavors of Linux. For Slackware you would add your program to the rc scripts in the /etc/rc.d directory. The program will need to daemonize itself after it starts. This is programmatically done with the daemon call.[*]Listen for TCP requests. Here you will need to create a socket and bind to a port. man 3 socket[*]Communicates with other processes. Not sure how you want to do this... You could talk with sockets, message queues, shared memory segments or even signals.[*]Know when the kernel is going down and cleanup. The kernel sends out a signal to all processes when it is about to shutdown. It's your job to catch the signal an do whatever cleanup needs to be done. Be sure to do only what is necessary since the kernel will send a sig kill moments after the shutdown signal.[*]System boots back up. See step one[/list=1]

hope this helps

If you want to do this in C then best resource would be Richard Stevens book

UNIX Network Programming, Volume 1, Second Edition: Networking APIs: Sockets and XTI, Prentice Hall, 1998, ISBN 0-13-490012-X.

http://www.kohala.com/start/unpv12e.html

This book covers signal handling and has a complete chapter on how to daemonize a process.

There is also "Advanced programming in the UNIX environment" also by Stevens. Great book

Thanks everyone for your assistance. I really appreciate it.

its pretty fun and you can write all sorts of servers:

http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~beej/guide/net/

this is by far the best socket programming guide ive seen online.


have fun!