Good morning, JoeDoggers. Let’s bask in the glow of Your Fido this morning; he’s all grown up and ready for love. What does that mean? Well, it means it now behaves like a contemporary modern daemon. Starting with version 1.1.5, if you send it SIGHUP, it will reload its configuration file.

Really? It’s been out since 2011 and you’re only adding that feature now?

Hey, what do you want from me? It’s free, isn’t it?

Here’s how it works: if you change fido’s configuration file, you can send it SIGHUP to reload its key = value pairs. There’s just one thing it won’t reload: its filenames.

Remember, a fido configuration file is divided into two parts; it contains global settings and file settings. The file settings are distinguished by a filename followed by two brackets like this: {}. Here’s an example:

/usr/local/var/my.log {
 # key = value pairs go here.
}

So if you change /usr/local/var/my.log to anything else, you’ll have to restart fido. If you change any other values, then you can just send it SIGHUP.

So how do I send it SIGHUP?

There’s several ways of doing this.

1.) You can look for the process ID (PID) with the ps command and send it SIGHUP (which is signal number 1):

# ps -aef | grep fido
root 31952 1 0 09:21 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/fido -f /etc/fido/fido.conf
# kill -1 31952

2.) Check your system documentation. Some kill commands support name values such as this:

# ps -aef | grep fido
root 31952 1 0 09:21 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/fido -f /etc/fido/fido.conf
Pom # kill -HUP 31952

3.) We can eliminate the ps command by using fido’s pid file like this:

# kill -1 $(cat /var/run/fido.pid)

You can verify a successful config reload by looking at /var/log/messages.

 [Download: Fido]