Flag to name jobs without using `immortaldir`

[Nova]

For lightweight or temporary usage of immortal, it's still useful to be able to refer to jobs by name. I'm thinking it could work something like this:

$ immortal -n datelog -l out.txt /bin/sh -c "date && sleep 5"
$ immortalctl status
  PID      Up   Down   Name    CMD
92315   4.3s          datelog   /bin/sh -c date && sleep 5
$ immortalctl exit datelog
PID   Up   Down   Name   CMD

I think this should be fairly straightforward to implement. If it's a feature that you agree would be useful, I would be happy to look into implementing it myself.

[Nicolas Embriz]

Hi, the reason for not using names and using the PIDs is because sometimes the same process may be required to run multiple times within the same session and by having the same name they would collide.

For permanent process, persistent to reboots is better to create a small datelog.yml file, for example:

cmd: date
log:
    file: /var/log/app-1.log
    age: 86400 # seconds
    num: 7     # int
    size: 1    # MegaBytes

And put it within the immortaldir

/usr/local/etc/immortaldir/datelog.yml

By doing this, you could then identify the process by a given name:

$ immortalctl exit datelog

[Nicolas Embriz]

I forgot the IMMORTAL_SDIR environment that can be used with the -ctl option so to achive what you want just need to do something like:

export IMMORTAL_SDIR=/tmp/immortal

And then just run the command like this:

immortal -ctl datelog -l out.txt /bin/sh -c "date && sleep 5"

later by just typing immortalctl you can see the name:

$ immortalctl
  PID     Up   Down   Name      CMD
88716   3.0s          datelog   /bin/sh -c date && sleep 5

If the environment var IMMORTAL_SDIR is not set, -ctl defaults to /var/run/immortal/<name>

If you always want to use names instead of PIDs, just need to always set the IMMORTAL_SDIR to the path where you would like to create the immortal.sock

Please give a try and let me know if working from your side.

[Nova]

Yes, the -ctl option is what I was looking for. Tested it out and it works perfectly. Thank you for the help, and for making such an awesome tool! 😃