[clug] How to "daemonize" a process

[Michael.James at csiro.au]

I have a need to run many (~1000) different jobs
 through the same program
 which unfortunately is only licensed on another machine.

I've set it up to rsync the work across,
 ssh a command to get it done
 and rsync the result file back
 but it's very slow.

It's not the actual work of executing the function
 or the overhead of ssh setting up the connection,
 it's running the startup scripts
 before the package's command springs into life.

How can I have an initialized, ready daemon
 that I can remotely call down onto a new pair of files?

I last saw something like this
 wrapping the scanning function
 of an anti virus mail gateway.

It would have killed the machine
 to load all the virus definitions
 for each attachment,
 so the attachments were stripped out
 and an already running daemon
 was invoked onto each file.

A solution in perl would be welcome...

michaelj


Michael James				michael.james at csiro.au
System Administrator			voice:	02 6246 5040
CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility	fax:		02 6246 5166