start-stop-daemon

ychaouche · 05-20-2021, 09:30 AM

Dear LQ,

I thought this command was universally aviable on all distros, but when I checked the manpage, I saw it is coming from the dpkg suite, which is debian specific. Does your distribution also have this command ? it is used in init.d scripts for your typical service stop|start|restart.

scasey · 05-21-2021, 02:34 AM

qmail and apache on my server have scripts that process start/stop/restart commands. systemd (systemctl) also supports those arguments. It’s been awhile since I used init.d, but I think that functionality is also supported there.

It’s not a daemon…and it’s not, as I understand it, related to the distro. It’s more a function of of the process.

GazL · 05-21-2021, 05:51 AM

CRUX make extensive use of 'start-stop-daemon' in their stock rc.d/* init-scripts.

Slackware doesn't. but has recently added a similar tool called 'daemon', though it's not extensively used yet.

systemd based systems likely have little use for it as they have their service unit files.

Personally, I'm not convinced start-stop-daemon provides much value. While it does have a lot of features, it's mostly used as a fancy if ! pgrep $processname ;then $processname ; fi

shruggy · 05-21-2021, 12:38 PM

Newer Fedora and RHEL releases just use systemctl, but still provide the shell function daemon() in file /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions that was previously used by init scripts in similarly to start-stop-daemon in Debian. Unlike Debian, its use wasn't mandated though. On CentOS 6, while most scripts source /etc/init.d/functions, only some of them make use of daemon (e.g. ntpd does, but sshd doesn't).