I'm using the start-stop-daemon to control my home automation software in Gentoo. It's all based in perl and after making changes if there are any coding bugs the process ends after initialization. This causes the start-stop-daemon to think it's still running when it's not. When I try to start again I get an error of "WARNING: "mh.rc" has already been started." The only way I have found to get things going again is a reboot. Somewhere there must be something I can clear to get the start-stop-daemon to know that it is in fact NOT running.

Start command:
start-stop-daemon --start --background --exec /mh/mh/bin/mh -- -log_file="/var/log/mh.log"

Stop command:
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /var/run/mh.pid

I'm having the same problem with start-stop-daemon where a processes errors out with a $? <> 0. Anyone know if this bug has been located?

The pid (process id) file still exists after the crash so the script assumes the process is running ....if it's truely stopped remove /var/run/mh.pid and restart it...

Yea that was the first thing I looked for. The pid file is getting cleaned up when misterhouse exits. something else is preventing stop-start-daemon from restarting.