[NBLUG/talk] Odd cron problem

[Walter Hansen]

Ok, this is odd. I reset it up in cron so that each process is run
individually and I get the same result. I've got this code in the
beginning of the program to fork it as a daemon and redirect output to a
log file. Anybody got anything on this?:

unless ($test)
  {
  chdir '/'                 or die "Can't chdir to /: $!";
  umask 0;
  open STDOUT, ">>$access_log" or die "Can't write to $access_log: $!";
  open STDERR, ">>$error_log" or die "Can't write to $error_log: $!";
  open STDIN, '/dev/null'   or die "Can't read /dev/null: $!";
  defined(my $pid = fork)   or die "Can't fork: $!";
  exit if $pid;
  setsid                    or die "Can't start a new session: $!";
  }



> I've got a perl program that forks itself and then redirects output to a
> file to run as a daemon. I've now implemented a little shell script that
> simply runs 11 such processes with command line options so each logs to a
> different file. I also have a cron event that starts these at a certain
> time as user root. I used to have 11 cron events, one for each process,
> but decided it would be simpler to have cron start one script that starts
> them all.
>
> Now when I run the script manually, everything goes fine. When I had cron
> start each process individually everything went fine. But when I have the
> script start them through cron the log files all show up as if I'd issued
> a touch command (size 0). They should start getting information
> immediately and then slow down to more every minute or so. I think perhaps
> it's somehow being buffered, but I don't see how as all I've done is place
> the program startup commands in the script file and made it executable.
> Perhaps I'm missing something. It's been a while since I've fooled with
> shell scripts.
>
> [root at abco nus]# cat attacktonight
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user marilyn
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user walter
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user robert
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user danny
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user donald
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user mary
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user dennis
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user arron
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user kevin
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user marci
> /root/nus/nus --die 30 --user jill
> [root at abco nus]#
>
> No, despite the name, this is not a malicious program. It's a competitive
> program and the admin of the other system is well aware of this process as
> well as all the others that do similar things.
>
>
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