I have been using phoenix and cron to keep my IRC bots alive for some time, however I never previously needed to see their output.

I actually wrote my own implementation of phoenix, before it was written.

http://svn.toolserver.org/svnroot/stwalkerster/trunk/helpmebot.sh

it's not the best script, but it seems to work well enough. I just hit it with cron every 5 minutes with the restart command, and it seems to work well enough

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Regards,

Simon Walker
User:Stwalkerster on all public Wikimedia Foundation wikis
Administrator on the English Wikipedia
Developer of Helpmebot, the ACC tool, and Nubio 2 FAQ repository