running a script from inittab

[Janet White]

I am in a bind and a hurry, I have an outside vendor running a c script to manipulate data and move it. They prefer to have it run out of inittab since it sleeps and wakes up and looks for files. Does anyone know how to do this? The script and sourcefile are in /usr/local/bin, and I would need to cd to /usr/local/bin then run the job as the srcfile is called from the job not with a full path name. I don't know how much if any of this makes sense, but it is one of those weeks where I am in training and my regular job to do too and I need help! Thank you for your time. btw hpux11.11

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

First do a man inittab; it's all rather self-explanatory. The only thing that may not be clear is that the action field should be "respawn". Each time your process terminates (ie the sleep ends) it will terminate and init will automatically restart the process. Make sure that all needed environment variables such as PATH are explicitly set in the script itself because the environment will be very sparse.
Once you edit inittab and add your entry; issue and "init q" command so that init will reread inittab and process your new entry.

[Janet White]

perfect, thank you