How can I make my server a daemon

Question Posted / pramodh

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How can I make my server a daemon..

Answer / raju

How can I make my server a daemon?
There are two approaches you can take here. The first is
to use inetd
to do all the hard work for you. The second is to do all
the hard
work yourself.

If you use inetd, you simply use stdin, stdout, or stderr
for your
socket. (These three are all created with dup() from the
real socket)
You can use these as you would a socket in your code.
The inetd
process will even close the socket for you when you are
done.

If you wish to write your own server, there is a detailed
explanation
in "Unix Network Programming" by Richard Stevens (see
``1.5 Where can
I get source code for the book [book title]?''). I also
picked up
this posting from comp.unix.programmer, by Nikhil Nair
(nn201@cus.cam.ac.uk). You may want to add code to
ignore SIGPIPE,
because if this signal is not dealt with, it will cause
your
application to exit. (Thanks to ingo@milan2.snafu.de for
pointing
this out).

I worked all this lot out from the GNU C Library Manual
(on-line
documentation). Here's some code I wrote - you can adapt
it as necessary:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <ctype.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>

/* Global variables */
volatile sig_atomic_t keep_going = 1; /* controls program
termination */

/* Function prototypes: */
void termination_handler (int signum); /* clean up before
termination */

int
main (void)
{
...

if (chdir (HOME_DIR)) /* change to directory
containing data
files */
{
fprintf (stderr, "`%s': ", HOME_DIR);
perror (NULL);
exit (1);
}

/* Become a daemon: */
switch (fork ())
{
case -1: /* can't fork */
perror ("fork()");
exit (3);
case 0: /* child, process
becomes a daemon: */
close (STDIN_FILENO);
close (STDOUT_FILENO);
close (STDERR_FILENO);
if (setsid () == -1) /* request a new session
(job control) */
{
exit (4);
}
break;
default: /* parent returns to
calling process: */
return 0;
}

/* Establish signal handler to clean up before
termination: */
if (signal (SIGTERM, termination_handler) == SIG_IGN)
signal (SIGTERM, SIG_IGN);
signal (SIGINT, SIG_IGN);
signal (SIGHUP, SIG_IGN);

/* Main program loop */
while (keep_going)
{
...
}
return 0;
}

void
termination_handler (int signum)
{
keep_going = 0;
signal (signum, termination_handler);
}