Hi all We have all seen the problem that some script or bot we have come to rely upon suddenly dies. Or fails to restart when the toolserver is rebooted. Putting something into cron to be run on @reboot sadly doesn't always work, for example because the home directory may not yet be mounted when cron runs reboot jobs. So, after a short discussion on IRC, i wrote a script to take care of this. I called if phoenix, it's available in the system path on nightshade and hemlock. Phonix just starts whatever command you give to it, but it first checks if that command is already running. If it is already running, phoenix does nothing. So, just call phonix from cron every few minutes to make sure your bot is restarted when it dies. For example, if you want to run 'mybot', call this every few minutes from cron: phoenix /tmp/yourname-mybot /home/mydir/bin/mybot someparam The path /tmp/yourname-mybot is the base fir the PID and output files - output fill be written to /tmp/yourname-mybot.out, the processes pid will be stored in /tmp/yourname-mybot.pid. The second parameter, /home/mydir/bin/mybot, is the program to run. Anything following that are parameters to pass to this program. Please try it out and tell me about any problems! phoenix also prints a short help message when called without any parameters. -- daniel PS: I'm sure this wheel has been invented before... any pointers?