Best way to make a shell script daemon?

Question

I'm wondering if there is a better way to make a daemon that waits for something using only sh than:

#! /bin/sh
trap processUserSig SIGUSR1
processUserSig() {
  echo "doing stuff"
}

while true; do
  sleep 1000
done

In particular, I'm wondering if there's any way to get rid of the loop and still have the thing listen for the signals.

Answer 1

# double background your script to have it detach from the tty
# cf. http://www.linux-mag.com/id/5981 
(./program.sh &) & 

Answer 2

See Bash Service Manager project: https://github.com/reduardo7/bash-service-manager

Implementation example

#!/usr/bin/env bash

export PID_FILE_PATH="/tmp/my-service.pid"
export LOG_FILE_PATH="/tmp/my-service.log"
export LOG_ERROR_FILE_PATH="/tmp/my-service.error.log"

. ./services.sh

run-script() {
  local action="$1" # Action

  while true; do
    echo "@@@ Running action '${action}'"
    echo foo
    echo bar >&2

    [ "$action" = "run" ] && return 0
    sleep 5
    [ "$action" = "debug" ] && exit 25
  done
}

before-start() {
  local action="$1" # Action

  echo "* Starting with $action"
}

after-finish() {
  local action="$1" # Action
  local serviceExitCode=$2 # Service exit code

  echo "* Finish with $action. Exit code: $serviceExitCode"
}

action="$1"
serviceName="Example Service"

serviceMenu "$action" "$serviceName" run-script "$workDir" before-start after-finish

Usage example

$ ./example-service
# Actions: [start|stop|restart|status|run|debug|tail(-[log|error])]

$ ./example-service start
# Starting Example Service service...

$ ./example-service status
# Serive Example Service is runnig with PID 5599

$ ./example-service stop
# Stopping Example Service...

$ ./example-service status
# Service Example Service is not running

Answer 3

Use your system's daemon facility, such as start-stop-daemon.

Otherwise, yes, there has to be a loop somewhere.

Answer 4

If I had a script.sh and i wanted to execute it from bash and leave it running even when I want to close my bash session then I would combine nohup and & at the end.

example: nohup ./script.sh < inputFile.txt > ./logFile 2>&1 &

inputFile.txt can be any file. If your file has no input then we usually use /dev/null. So the command would be:

nohup ./script.sh < /dev/null > ./logFile 2>&1 &

After that close your bash session,open another terminal and execute: ps -aux | egrep "script.sh" and you will see that your script is still running at the background. Of cource,if you want to stop it then execute the same command (ps) and kill -9 <PID-OF-YOUR-SCRIPT>

Answer 5

Just backgrounding your script (./myscript &) will not daemonize it. See http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/programmer/faq/, section 1.7, which describes what's necessary to become a daemon. You must disconnect it from the terminal so that SIGHUP does not kill it. You can take a shortcut to make a script appear to act like a daemon;

nohup ./myscript 0<&- &>/dev/null &

will do the job. Or, to capture both stderr and stdout to a file:

nohup ./myscript 0<&- &> my.admin.log.file &

However, there may be further important aspects that you need to consider. For example:

• You will still have a file descriptor open to the script, which means that the directory it's mounted in would be unmountable. To be a true daemon you should chdir("/") (or cd / inside your script), and fork so that the parent exits, and thus the original descriptor is closed.
• Perhaps run umask 0. You may not want to depend on the umask of the caller of the daemon.

For an example of a script that takes all of these aspects into account, see Mike S' answer.

Answer 6

Have a look at the daemon tool from the libslack package:

http://ingvar.blog.linpro.no/2009/05/18/todays-sysadmin-tip-using-libslack-daemon-to-daemonize-a-script/

On Mac OS X use a launchd script for shell daemon.