perlology:

A few notes in no particular order:

• I'd suggest redirecting your output to a scratch file while debugging, just in case the daemonized and/or shell script emits some errors that might help you along. You can use /dev/null after you have it properly demonified.
• Should you rewrite the shell script in perl? That depends: If the script is tiny and easy to convert, then I'd do so. If it's large it may not be worth the hassle. If you like, you might write a couple of chunks of it in perl, and call that from the shell script, and as you maintain it, you can suck more of the shell script into perl as makes sense. For example, I can never remember sed well enough to use it, so I just use perl for all my sed jobs.
• It looks like you may be removing $PID_FILENAME too soon. It appears that when you do the "detach terminal" bit, after the fork, it'll get dropped. You might want to add your signal handler after you've achieved complete deemonification.

Note: Yes, the entire reason for this post was so I could write a couple goofy variations on the word 'daemon'. I had a couple other variations, but forgot 'em before I found a place to put 'em.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.