[ale] inittab respawn

[Jeff Lightner]

Yes it will try to execute it and fail because it doesn't exist.  It
will then respawn because it failed and fail again etc...

In older Unix this would in fact cause an infinite loop and severely
impact performance on the server while it was respawning.   I haven't
seen quite such a performance hit on newer Linux/UNIX but then again I
rely a lot less on inittab than I did back in the days where everything
was serial connections and inittab was a good way of conditioning the
connections with getty etc...

You could try things like "once" that only try it one time and quit if
unsuccessful.   The point in respawn is it gives you an easy way other
than cron to insure a process is always restarted if it dies for some
reason.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
Kevin O'Neill Stoll
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2008 3:57 PM
To: ALE
Subject: [ale] inittab respawn

I was checking out (http://www.netadmintools.com/html/inittab.man.html)
the inittab manpage looking for this answer but wanted some real world
experience input.



Let's assume I have an entry in inittab:

4:2345:respawn:/bin/does_not_exist





and the script/executable "/bin/does_not_exist" doesn't exist on this
file system. Does the respawn 

command just blindly attempt to execute that command regardless of the
command not existing?



I suspect this would just cause an infinite loop?



thanks









 
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