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I have background application A.

I want to create application B to configure application A on the fly.

So, how can I detect if A is running and send some messages to A?

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You could start here‌​, but I suppose in this generality this is not the right venue for your question. (If you had problems with, say, IPC via specific UNIX-y ways...) – sr_ May 8 '12 at 9:12
@sr_ consider to convert your comment to answer – yarek May 8 '12 at 11:02
This is probably more appropriate on StackOverflow.com – ams May 8 '12 at 11:10
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It might be appropriate here but it's hard to tell because it's worded so generally. There are many different situations where this could apply, and many different answers. Mireck, I think it would help if you better describe A and B and the environment in which they are running. – mattdm♦ May 8 '12 at 12:40
Do you have control over the code of prorgram A? If that's the case, I could do a small presentation of IPC. If not, I'm afraid there's no general answer. You'll have to give us the name of program A and we may look up ways to do so. – rahmu May 8 '12 at 14:31

closed as off topic by jw013, sr_, Mat, manatwork, Renan Aug 15 '12 at 2:37

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2 Answers

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If you just want to change the program's configuration, the typical method of doing that is to update its conf file, then send it a SIGHUP signal, which it is programmed to respond to by reloading its conf file ( see signal(7) ). As Coren said, you typically have the program store its pid in a file in /var/run when it starts so you can later send it the signal.

If you need more complex communication with the program, you will want to use either a fifo or unix domain socket. A fifo ( see fifo(7) and mkfifo(3) ) is simpler, but the daemon can only communicate with a single control program. Unix domain sockets ( see unix(7) ) are more complicated to use, but you can accept connections from multiple clients.

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Background application are called "daemon" in Unix & Linux world.

They are standardized in many ways, one way is how to get their pid. They usually create a pid file in /var/run.

With their pid, you can know nearly everything about them with the help of /proc. You can know if it's still active, memory used, memory mapping, files open, etc, etc.

And as sr_ said, you can then use IPC methods in order to communicate with it.

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