Bug 8755

Yup, known bug, fixed in initscripts-4.84.

I suppose the fix in initscripts-4.84 is functional, but it's not how I would
have fixed it.  In fact, it's not how I *did* fix it :-).

I realize that you need to have the "for apid in $pidlist" code in daemon and
killproc because if you put it in pidofproc it's actually running in a
subprocess and therefore doesn't do the right thing (i.e., it keeps a pid in the
list which shouldn't be in the list).  But this special-case code is gross and
doesn't fix the underlying problem that pidofproc is returning bogus
information.

Here's how I fixed it:

--- functions	2000/01/25 22:38:54	1.1
+++ functions	2000/01/25 23:47:20
@@ -12,6 +12,27 @@
 # First set up a default search path.
 export PATH="/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin"

+# Unfortunately, the "pidof -x" invocations below will find this
+# script if it has the same name as the process being checked or
+# killed.  To avoid this, we want to give pidof a list of process IDs
+# to ignore.  More unfortunately, this is not as simple as just
+# telling it to ignore our PID, because we may be in a subprocess of
+# the actual script, e.g., because of a shell function run inside
+# backquotes.  Even more unfortunately, such a subprocess returns the
+# PID of the base process when $$ is evaluated, rather than returning
+# the PID of the subprocess, so there's no easy way to get the PIDs of
+# such subprocesses to exclude them.  To surmount these obstacles, use
+# some awk magic to get all the PIDs in a chain from the current PID
+# back to $$.
+
+AWK_PROG='NR == 1 { self=$1 }
+{ parent[$1] = $2 }
+END { while (self != upto) { self=parent[self]; print "-o " self } }'
+
+exclude_pids () {
+    ps -A --format '%p %P' | awk "$AWK_PROG" upto=$$ /dev/pid -
+}
+
 # Get a sane screen width
 [ -z "$COLUMNS" ] && COLUMNS=80

@@ -170,7 +191,7 @@
 	fi

 	# Next try "pidof"
-	pid=`pidof -x $1`
+	pid=$(pidof $(exclude_pids) -x $1)
 	if [ "$pid" != "" ] ; then
 	        echo $pid
 	        return 0
@@ -185,7 +206,7 @@
 	fi

 	# First try "pidof"
-	pid=`pidof -x $1`
+	pid=`pidof $(exclude_pids) -x $1`
 	if [ "$pid" != "" ] ; then
 	        echo "$1 (pid $pid) is running..."
 	        return 0