how do you return an exit code with out exiting

[Matthew Thorley]

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? or is
there are better way to do this?

Thanks
--
Matthew Thorley