[ILUG] Bash script - technical question

[gregwm]

> The idea of the daemon + the crontab job controlling it sounds like a good
> idea... I might give it a try...

did one of those entirely in bash.  start with a script much like
those that live in /etc/init.d, add an entry for cron, when it forks
itself redirect all input and output to /dev/null, so when you invoke
it from a prompt it won't get hung up in shell job control.  you can
scatter the code into multiple script files if you like but the one i
did was all in one file.  you'll of course need to handle simultaneous
invocations, via cron or otherwise.  the strategy i used was to have
the old one voluntarily die when a new one gets launched.

> Alternatively you can put an entry in /etc/inittab

recent versions of ubuntu omit /etc/inittab.