GNU Pies – Program Invocation and Execution Supervisor

Source: Hacker News

Overview

The name Pies (pronounced “p-yes”) stands for Program Invocation and Execution Supervisor. This utility starts and controls execution of external programs, called components. Each component is a stand‑alone program, which is executed in the foreground.

Operation

Upon startup, pies reads the list of components from its configuration file, starts them, and remains in the background, controlling their execution. If any of the components terminates, the default action of Pies is to restart it. It can also be programmed to perform a variety of other actions such as sending mail notifications to the system administrator, invoking another external program, etc.

Use as an init daemon

GNU pies can also be used as an init daemon — the first process started during booting. The configuration can be supplied both as a traditional /etc/inittab file or as a native GNU pies configuration file, which gives much more flexibility.

Management

The control interface provides extensive monitoring and management capabilities.