Scripting question

[redhead]

You could use pidof, seems a bit simpler than what you have.

if [ ! pidof fetchmail ]
then
fetchmail
fi

Since this is *BSD, theres no pidof..

[kenshi]

Since this is *BSD, theres no pidof..

Correct. I have no pidof command in PATH.

[Feztaa]

I'm sure it would be a terrible pain to install.. but whatever.

[redhead]

I'm sure it would be a terrible pain to install.. but whatever.

From where?? Since its part of GNUs SysVinit, then you'll have to get the tar ball and install from there, since no maintainer of BSD have made it available in the ports tree.. And mixing different init systems will never turn out right.. Might be the reason no one ported it..

[Feztaa]

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/view...06/psmisc.html

pidof is a symlink to killall from psmisc.

[gorn]

pidof is a symlink to killall from psmisc.

iirc killall isnt on bsd boxen

[Feztaa]

christ, and this is supposed to be a decent operating system? :P

I don't see why BSD people couldn't install psmisc, though... I suppose they don't even have the /proc heirarchy, do they?

(edit: smileys)

[kenshi]

iirc killall isnt on bsd boxen

Now there, you're wrong. I definately have a killall on my system. I don't see how pidof can be a symlink of killall when they perform different functions though. Pidof is supposed to return the pid of a program, right?

[Feztaa]

Now there, you're wrong. I definately have a killall on my system.

I doubt it's the one that comes in the psmisc package, though...

I don't see how pidof can be a symlink of killall when they perform different functions though. Pidof is supposed to return the pid of a program, right?

It's possible for a program to act differently depending on it's name. On my system, pidof is actually a symlink of killall5 (just noticed, heh). killall5 is this fun program that will send a signal to every single process that's running... great fun to play with that... but pidof will simply return the pids of all instances of the programname:

feztaa@feztron:/home/feztaa$ ls -l `locate killall|grep bin` `which pidof`
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root   root     28k Apr 20 19:03 /bin/killall
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root   root      16 Apr 20 19:36 /bin/pidof -> ../sbin/killall5
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root   root     8.8k Apr 20 19:36 /sbin/killall5
feztaa@feztron:/home/feztaa$ pidof httpd
212 211 210 209 208 178

[kenshi]

Interesting.