The daemon command has an option `-f`, which, according to the man page, redirects stding,stdout,stderr to /dev/null. This is fine. But if I cannot redirect stdin, stdout, stderr to different files respectively. There is a `-o` option, ``` -o output_file Append output from the daemonized process to output_file. If the file does not exist, it is created with permissions 0600. ``` The problem I am having now is that daemon command was used in some freebsd rc.d scripts without the `-f` option. When I try to restart those services through python subprocess.Popen, it would hang indefinitely. The problem can be easily reproduced by ``` python3 -c 'import subprocess; subprocess.Popen(["/usr/sbin/service", "mytestservice", "onerestart"], stderr=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()' ``` I can add the `-f` option to fix the problem, but `-f` will override the `-o` option, and I end up with no log at all. I think it would be nice if the daemon command can support redirecting stdin, stdout, stderr separately.
I am working on daemon improvements and this feature is planned to be added once transition to kqueue is finished.
zhoutao@laocius.org: You could send logs to syslog, if that works for you. Check these daemon options: --syslog Send output to syslog --output-mask What to send to syslog/file 1=stdout, 2=stderr, 3=both I know this is not ideal. I am thinking about the way to add the feature you request without breaking the current interface and without making it inconsistent/incoherent..
Although it's also weird that I'm still using 12.4-STABLE... :) I replaced /usr/sbin/daemon with one built using the 10.4-STABLE source code. This is because the behavior of standard output and standard error output has changed. I used to use it as follows, but the current version, which specializes in log output, changes in content. daemon -p /tmp/daemon.pid cat /dev/somedevice > /tmp/output.dat I had to update FreeBSD to 13 or 14, but I looked for a workaround to avoid using daemon of version 10, and I got the following. daemon -p /tmp/daemon.pid -m 0 -o /dev/null cat /dev/somedevice > /tmp/output.dat Setting -m to 0 is not in usage, but it prevents the two output descriptors of the child process from switching to the log pipe. Using the -o or -S options suppresses the output of the log to standard output. It seems that stdin, stdout, and stderr will now be the same as when daemon is started. I finally got to it today :)