I have a start script that uses start-stop-daemon to run a perl script. Works find when executed manually but when I run it in a script I get:

Starting collectl: collectlsh: /bin/rpm: No such file or directory
sh: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `|'
sh: -c: line 0: `|head -n1'
.

The actual command being executed in the script is:
start-stop-daemon --quiet --start --exec $COLLECTL -- -D
where $COLLECTL is set to /opt/hp/collectl/sbin/collectl

the funny thing is my daemon DOES start! I can't find any references to rpm in the start-stop-daemon man page and since this command is binary, I can't see what it's doing.

rpm IS on the system only its in /usr/bin/rpm instead of /bin/rpm and I want my script to be flexible enough to run on differently configured systems

any idea what's going on and whether or not this is a bug or a feature of start-stop-daemon?

-mark

My guess would be that the $PATH environment variable may not be set properly in the shell the script launches, and start-stop-daemon can't handle this. You could try adding an export PATH= line to the script.

I tried exporting the path and that didn't help. Since the message explicitly says /bin/rpm, I wouldn't have thought that would work. Meanwhile I found if I defined a softlink to /usr/bin/rpm it works, but that's an extra hack I'd rather not have to do.

Is /usr/bin/rpm a non-standard location for rpm on a debian system? Or more importantly is /bin/rpm a required path to rpm on debian? Feels like it may be for start-stop-daemon which would be unfortunate.

-mark

Mark,

I downloaded your package from sourceforge ( collectl-3.1.0-8.noarch.rpm ), converted it to a deb file using alien, and installed it using dpkg.

It starts fine from the command line and running your script collectl-debian on my system.

I'll remove the deb package and try installing it as an rpm package and see if that produces the error. It will be tomorrow evening before I can do that though.

Nice program. Produces lots of interesting data.

Norm