daemons (LONG -- was Re: Problem with putting a process in the 'background')

[John R. MacMillan]

|How have others tackled daemons?  Are these ways I could have done
|this stuff better?

I got sick of the way the 3B1 handled this stuff (note that the stock
shutdown does a killall, and THEN runs things in /etc/shutdaemons) so
I changed to be rather like SysVr3, with and /etc/rc0 and /etc/rc2,
and daemon startup and shutdown scripts in /etc/rc0.d and /etc/rc2.d
directories.  I also mutilated, I mean, reworked /etc/shutdown, and
the basic startup (now in /etc/bcheckrc) doesn't look much like it
used to; it verifies that the time is correct (my battery died and I'm
too lazy or cheap to replace it), and asks if you want to go single or
multi-user.

That brings me to an aside.  Both those prompts time out, and when I
was doing these changes I remembered there had been a discussion about
programs to do that.  I didn't have any of them on hand, so I just did
it in the script.  Did I miss something about the advantages of using
a separate command?