how do you return an exit code with out exiting

[Grant Edwards]

On 2005-05-23, Matthew Thorley <ruach at chpc.utah.edu> wrote:

> I wrote a simple python program that scrapes a web page every
> 30 secons and dumps the result in a data base. I want to use
> my linux distros build in init tools to run the script in the
> back ground as a daemon. The problem is when I call the daemon
> script to background the program I wrote it just hangs,
> waiting for my program to exit 1 or 0. My program never does
> exits because its looping every 30 seconds.
>
> Is there a way I can pass an exit value with out actualy exiting?

No.

> or is there are better way to do this?

Yes.  

To be a well-behavied daemon, you need to do the things
described in this howto:

  http://www.linuxprofilm.com/articles/linux-daemon-howto.html

Here are a couple references on how to do this in Python:

  http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/278731
  http://homepage.hispeed.ch/py430/python/
  
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