Hi,

I have an application that in general I want it to be always up. Therefore I tought of using the inittab in order to define it there with a respawn.
On the other hand, it might be that the user will need to shutdown this application (for example during maintanence, upgrades etc.) Therefor I need the ability to allow him to do so, and I tought define it under the /etc/rc.d/rc.X directories so the user can activate or deactivate it.
My question - Since I understand that the respawn takes care that the process will be restarted automatically when it is down (crashed or stopped by the user), how can I give solution for both requirments (keeps that the process will be restarted when it crashed, but do nothing when it is stopped in purpose by the user?

Thanks in advance

Well, you could use some kind of flag file, but that could be problematic with respawn ie it'll keep try to restart, which you don't want.
What you can do (less frantic) is put a job in cron that checks for the job every eg 5 mins and restarts it if not up.
Use a crontab that the user can edit, so he can comment out the job when he doesn't want a restart.
Possibly look at sudo if job HAS to run as root.

Thanks for th help.