Question

Can we hook to similar start,stop etc events. Do we have to write them as shell scripts? I know of mono port of .NET.

Answer 1

You are looking for something called an ‘init script’. These are scripts that allow you to start or stop a service with a single command, like so:

service httpd restart
service httpd stop
service httpd start

Some Linux distributions do not include the service command, in which case you access init scripts directly by their location, /etc/init.d, like so.

/etc/init.d/mysqld restart

You can program your init script to accept whatever parameters you want (start, stop, restart, etc). Some basic tutorials on writing init scripts to get you started can be found at the following web pages:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-write-sys-v-init-script-to-start-stop-service.html
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/how-to-write-init-script-376302/

Many times an init script is unnecessary, and you can just go with the simpler option of executing your program in the background and killing it manually. Running an executable on Linux in the background can be done like so:

./some_prog arg1 arg2 &

And killing it is done like this:

kill `pgrep some_prog`

If you are fairly new to Linux, that latter option might be a much easier way to go until you get a handle on init scripts and the general Linux service ecosystem.