NAME

stalepid — check for and remove stale process ID files

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The stalepid utility was developed to facilitate the startup of servers that write their process ID to a file and refuse to start if that file exists (e.g. when the process was last terminated by an unclean shutdown, or simply killed, not given the chance to clean up the process ID file). The stalepid utility is used to check for and possibly remove those stale process ID files. Upon its invocation, stalepid checks for the following conditions:

• the file specified by the pidfile argument exists;
• it contains a single line, and the line contains a single number;
• there is no process with the process ID specified in the file, or if there is one, it is not named processname.

If all those conditions are met, the stalepid utility will remove the file specified by the pidfile argument, thus allowing the next invocation of the server to proceed normally.

The following options are available:

-b

Invoke the ps(1) utility using BSD syntax (the default behavior).

-d

Display diagnostic information during the course of operation.

-h

Display a short help message and exit.

-V

Display program version information and exit.

ENVIRONMENT

Not taken in consideration in the present version.

FILES

None relevant in the present version.

HISTORY

The stalepid utility was developed by Peter Pentchev in 2003.

AUTHORS

Peter Pentchev ⟨roam@ringlet.net⟩.