barnson.org Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.

1. Userspace processes should not be run from /etc/init.d, only those things which are required when the machine boots up. Put it into your home directory somewhere. I tend to use /home/mbarnson/bin and add that to my $PATH.
2. If I wanted it to run every five minutes, I'd set that first field as 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 rather than */5 because the */5 syntax is ONLY honored on Linux, while the longer syntax is recognized on every UNIX variant.
3. The quotes are not necessary for this command, as you don't have any spaces in the command you're running (spaces between command and arguments are fine). It will parse fine without them. However, if you wish to use them, they won't hurt. All they do is tell the shell interpreter to do variable substitution within the quotes, and perform escapes on any strings that need it, like spaces, reserved keywords, etc.
4. If sslexplorer is supposed to run when the machine boots, you would be better off to create it as a legitimate daemon with an appropriate symlink to the runlevels where it should execute. If it absolutely must restart when it dies, add it as an init-controlled service via /etc/inittab (man inittab for details). Or you could wrap a monitoring daemon around it as a startup daemon, which is like 5 lines of code.

To sum up, if this is a program that needs to be running all the time, add it as a full-fledged initscript that honors stop, start, and restart commands, or else put it directly under the control of init so that it will respawn if killed (like the individual TTYs do). If it truly needs run only intermittently, go ahead and run it under cron.

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Matthew P. Barnson

I suspect Sam meant to post in another thread, and even there, he may have wanted to Create A New Blog Entry rather than add a new comment...

And, dude, if you put "Matthew" anywhere in the name of your son, I will wire you money via Paypal ;)

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Matthew P. Barnson

I think he edited his blog entry after I replied. I look stupid enough already, I don't need other people helping me along!

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Matthew P. Barnson

SSL Explorer has a nice init script. It is supposed to start at boot. I just want to make sure it restarts upon crash.

So how do I put it under the control of init or do the monitoring daemon thingy?

My $.02
Weed