Hello, all. I'm running RH 7.2 on a converted Hewlett-Packard, and I'm having an odd problem with a script I want to run as a background job.

First, I can run the script just fine in the foreground, and start it OK in the background. But after a certain period of time I get a message saying the job is stopped. I can restart it in the fg, but if I do so in the bg after a while the same thing recurs.

I checked my documentaion, and it said a background job would stop if it read from stdin, or wrote to stdout with a certain option set. The script has no points where it asks for input, and the tostop flag on stty is not set. Is there another reason it might stop, or some setting in RH 7.2 I need to adjust?

Second, I want this script to be started in the background on bootup. I tried adding a script to call it to /etc/rc.d/init.d but it doesn't seem to be starting. Would it work better if I added a line calling it to rc.local, or is there some config file for init.d I need to add my calling script to?

Thanks, everybody.

You'll probably need to add it to a runlevel, or use the @reboot cron syntax.

As for your main problem: can you determine at what point it is stopping? That might narrow down the cause somewhat.

What type of script is this? If it's just a bash script and you're having problems with it dying off by invoking it to run in the background, then I'd say try running it in a screen session to get more output of why it's dying.

Thanks, guys. Adding a line to rc.local that invoked the script in the background fixed the problem: It comes up everytime I reboot and doesn't time out.