How to respawn a script in RHEL/Centos6 when /etc/inittab has been deprecated?

Question

I have a custom init script and I want that script to be respawned if in case the process dies.

In RHEL/Centos 6 /etc/inittab is deprecated. So how should I ensure the process will be respawned?

Solution

On RHEL 6 to respawn a script, go to /etc/init and create a file

cd /etc/init
vi scriptFileName.conf

And add this content

start on stopped rc RUNLEVEL=[12345]
stop on runlevel [!12345]
respawn
exec /you/respawned/script.sh -your -parameters

Save file and then launch this command (without .conf of file)

start scriptFileName

Thats all!

Comments

[Shashank]

Thanks a lot John for quick help. That looks great. But I was looking for some functionality which is native to linux. Something which is alternative to 'inittab'. Any idea about that?

[John]

you can use /etc/init (which is different then /etc/init.d ) and use respawn in the init file , you can see a good example here: grokbase.com/t/centos/centos/11a4n4x2gt/…

[Michael Hampton]

@Shashank systemd will handle this in RHEL 7, but you didn't say you were using that.

[yurenchen]

seems like ubuntu upstart service manager