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Asked: 2026-06-11T11:12:03+00:00

I am writing a perl script to parse, for example, /var/log/syslog . The perl

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I am writing a perl script to parse, for example, /var/log/syslog.

The perl script triggers further subsequent tasks when particular events in the log appear. The log is parsed following the advice of this post:

Command line: monitor log file and add data to database

Which what I believe is the use of a pipe.

Now I’d like this script to forever run in the background.

This sounds like a daemon to me, and the daemon program referenced in the following question seems ideal:

How can I run a Perl script as a system daemon in linux?

But from this post, it seems clear that daemon’s have no open file handles. So how can I have a daemon, or a perl script that becomes a daemon, that monitors a logfile?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It sounds like what you want is a daemon. In that case the advise given in the second post you reference is the best practice. However, you do have other options like daemontools, which removes the fork complexity.

    Daemons are allowed to have filehandles, but you should close STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERRR because you shouldn’t really use them anymore. A lot of this has to do with the way fork works in *nix systems. Just open the pipe filehandle after your second fork, and you shouldn’t have any issues.

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