markd@macports.org wrote:

...

i Mark,

So it looks like the bit magic that got this to work is the -f command, which basically tells dhcpd not to daemonize, which would be a good thing in our case, as the process of daemonizing would look to daemondo or launchd as if dhcpd were exiting, which would cause the constantly restarting behavior Blair described.

Hi James,

So I've looked up what "daemonize" means and I see it entails making a child of the initializing process. So I understand why daemondo thinks a daemonized process has exited. But might some processes not have a switch to keep in the foreground as in the case of dhcp? And if not, would that be the rare case where startupitem.pidfile would be used with startupitem.executable? If I recall correctly, they could be used together but I hadn't thought of a reason where it would be useful to do so. At the very least I should document that processes that daemonize are a problem for startupitem.executable.

I think most programs that daemonize themselves have a command line option to stay in the foreground. It makes it easier for the program to be debugged. Regards, Blair -- Blair Zajac, Ph.D. CTO, OrcaWare Technologies <blair@orcaware.com> Subversion training, consulting and support http://www.orcaware.com/svn/