I am fairly new at this, I am just wondering if someone can tell me how to reconfigure so that a certain program runs at startup and runs in the background continuously. I would appreciate any input...
Becky

use crontab...it depends on your program if started whether it keeps running or it terminates, if u wish to keep starting/running enter in the crontab to run every 'n ' minutes

if U want this program to start at boot time only you could make an enrty in rc.local file

which distribution are you using? if your using Redhat 7.2 there is a program called "Service Configuration" that manages all the daemons--programs that run on the background--

I'm not really an expert in things like this, but if you're using bash you can edit the file .bash_profile.rc (which should be in your home directory). Notice the dot in front of the name meaning it's hidden (so use 'ls -a' to see it, or if you use X, set your File Navigator to show hidden files).

The first line of the file should be a comment (starting with #) so ignore it. Type in the path and name of your program on the line right after the comment (or the first line of the file if there's no #)

Here's an example(let's say your program is /usr/bin/prog1)

#Some comment
/usr/bin/prog1 <-- type this line in
other bash stuff

Also if the program is not an executable, make sure to put a dot and a whitespace before it's path:

. /usr/bin/prog1 <--like so

Final Note : Just for precautions make a copy of .bash_profile.rc and put it somewhere else (so if something goes wrong you can always restore the original file as root)