From: Mark Hubbart <discord@...>
Date: 2004-02-21T04:50:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Unix daemon conventions

Hi,

On Feb 20, 2004, at 9:34 AM, Robert K. wrote:

> There might be better grouop, however I  just finished writing a ruby 
> daemon script. The script, if called with uid==0, walks through all 
> useres homes. It tries to open a file each user and work according to 
> it's content.  Rather like fetchmail.
> It works.
> Now what's wrong:
>
> I reduced the search on Uids 0 and >=500. Is this good/OK ?
I'm not exactly sure about other platforms, but under Darwin/MacOSX, 
this would be appropriate. Any users that you miss are daemons anyway. 
Is it this way on other unices?

> I do a test on the existence of a directory -- must be good.
> For UID==0 I work the same as a normal user. I look for a ".file" in 
> root's home. Shall I better loock at /etc/file, or even both?
Hmm... In my experience, "~root/.file" would be a configuration file 
specifically for the root user, whereas "/etc/file" (no dot) is a 
system-wide file, for all users. It would seem to me that the proper 
use for a "/etc/file" would be to load it first, before loading each 
user's "~/.file". Configurations from the user's dotfile would 
overwrite the ones from the system-wide one, as necessary.

for example, everyone, root included, can have their own .bashrc file, 
but if there is a /etc/bashrc, it gets loaded before the dotfile, no 
matter which user; root or otherwise.