Hi! It works perfectly (at least for me), just you have to ensure, that you call it with appropriate rights while testing: my testing: sentinel@sentinel:~$ su Password: with power comes great responsibility root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# PID=`pidof -o %PPID -x /usr/sbin/proftpd` root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# echo $PID 7469 root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# [ -z "$PID" ] && echo "pid is empty" root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# Tom Dan McGee wrote:

On Feb 8, 2008 1:27 PM, Michael Krauss wrote:

...

Hi to .*

I must write a rc init script for a server I am packaging. Therefor I have copied the init script of cups. Now I recognized that both pid files, cups.pid and my own, in /var/run are empty.

Further investigations have shown that

"pidof -o %PPID -x /usr/bin/cdvserver"

returns nothing in the start) case but in stop) it seems to work. I don't understand why pidof isn't working as expected.

Because you are calling pidof before the process starts- bash does not do lazy evaluation of your expressions.

If you want to store the PID of the newly started process, you will have to make another PID=... call to get it in the else block where you access it.

...

Here is my init script: #!/bin/bash

. /etc/rc.conf . /etc/rc.d/functions

PID=`pidof -o %PPID -x /usr/bin/cdvserver` PIDFILE="/var/run/cdvserver.pid" case "$1" in start) stat_busy "Starting Codeville Server" [ -z "$PID" ] && /usr/bin/cdvserver if [ $? -gt 0 ]; then stat_fail else echo "Started " $PID echo $PID > $PIDFILE add_daemon cdv stat_done fi ;; stop) stat_busy "Stopping Codeville Server" [ ! -z "$PID" ] && kill $PID &> /dev/null if [ $? -gt 0 ]; then stat_fail else rm $PIDFILE rm_daemon cdv stat_done fi ;; restart) $0 stop sleep 1 $0 start ;; *) echo "usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}" esac exit 0

yes you are right. root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# /etc/rc.d/proftpd stop :: Stopping ProFTPd Server [DONE] root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# PID=`pidof -o %PPID -x /usr/sbin/proftpd` root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# echo $PID root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# Sorry, I made a mistake. I usually do not have my ftp server running. But I forgot, that I was moving something between my computer and laptop. :) Btw proftpd's init script does the same. The proftpd.pid file is empty. T Travis Willard wrote:

On Feb 8, 2008 3:06 PM, Sentinel wrote:

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Hi!

It works perfectly (at least for me), just you have to ensure, that you call it with appropriate rights while testing: my testing: sentinel@sentinel:~$ su Password: with power comes great responsibility root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# PID=`pidof -o %PPID -x /usr/sbin/proftpd` root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# echo $PID 7469 root@sentinel:/home/sentinel# [ -z "$PID" ] && echo "pid is empty" root@sentinel:/home/sentinel#

Tom

That is because you already have /usr/sbin/proftpd running. In the case of running the start initscript, the PID is sampled before the application ever starts, and hence will return no PID, as Dan already explained.