Systemd and the daemon

[DarkElvenAngel]

Hello everyone,

I wrote a daemon that will fork itself but when I try to run it from systemd the demonizing code doesn't run and the daemon will not run correctly.

I don't understand why this is the case I used

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Type=forking

in the service but looking at my daemons log it is skipping the demonize function because it already thinks it's forked?

What can I do to correct this?

Thanks

[pfletch101]

You can give us a lot more information! The complete unit file would be a good start. However, I would also check that neither the unit file nor the code you are running makes assumptions about where they are running - file references should be absolute.

[DarkElvenAngel]

You can give us a lot more information! The complete unit file would be a good start. However, I would also check that neither the unit file nor the code you are running makes assumptions about where they are running - file references should be absolute.

Okay so I have a daemon I wrote in C and whenever I run it from the CLI it works perfectly, and the daemon forks thus creating the lock PID file. But when I was using the systemd service to launch it the didn't fork and doesn't create the lock PID file. I didn't include a service file because none of them would work. From the very simple to most complex.

I traced the issue to this line in my code

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if(getppid() == 1) return;
i = fork();

Since systemd is PID 1 it would return and not fork and finish setup. So I had to change that line to

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if(getpid() == 1) return;

It might have been a typo in the example code or just something old that doesn't work anymore, but now the daemon forks and runs properly. So I sorted it out.

Thanks for replying

[RamaSpaceShip]

if(getpid() == 1) return;

Since your process cannot have pid 1, this line is useless.

[DarkElvenAngel]

if(getpid() == 1) return;

Since your process cannot have pid 1, this line is useless.

That's what I thought, so why does it work? What is a better way to get the process to fork reliable?

[RamaSpaceShip]

Does it stop forking if you remove that line (if(getpid() == 1) return;) ?

[DarkElvenAngel]

Does it stop forking if you remove that line (if(getpid() == 1) return;) ?

No it still works just fine. Since it wasn't documented I was under the impression that line was to prevent the daemon becoming a fork bomb.

So I will just leave it out.