GNU Pies README See the end of file for copying conditions. * Introduction This file contains brief information about configuring, testing and running Pies. It is *not* intended as a replacement for the documentation, it is provided as a brief reference only. The complete documentation for Pies is available in doc/ subdirectory. To read it without installing the package run `info -f doc/pies.info'. After the package is installed the documentation can be accessed running `info Pies'. Invoking `info pies' (with lower-case `p') will show you a concise description of the command line syntax (similar to a man-page style). * Overview GNU Pies (pronounced ``p-yes'') stands for the Program Invocation and Execution Supervisor. This utility starts and controls execution of external programs, called ``components''. Each component is a stand-alone program, designed to be executed in the foreground. Upon startup pies reads the list of components from its configuration file, starts them, and remains in the background, controlling their execution. When a component terminates, pies tries to restarts it. Its configuration allows to specify actions other than simple restart, depending on the exit code of the component. GNU Pies gives you complete control over the execution environment of each component. This includes modifying shell environment, running components with the given user privileges, etc. The standard error and/or output of any component may be redirected either to a disk file or to syslog. GNU Pies supports a wide variety of component types. For example, it can bind the standard input and output of a component to a network socket, which makes pies a replacement for the inetd utility. Pies implements powerful access control lists, which are especially useful with such inetd-style components. GNU Pies can also be used to manage MeTA1 (http://meta1.org) components. To facilitate its use, GNU Pies is able to parse configuration files in various formats, such as traditional inetd.conf, or meta1.conf. So that, e.g. migration from the native mcp utility to pies does not require any efforts. Finally, GNU Pies can be used as init process - the first process started during booting. In this case, the configuration can be supplied both in the traditional inittab or in native Pies formats. The running GNU Pies instance can be queried and reconfigured on the fly via a TCP socket. * Building A usual three-state procedure: ./configure make make install See INSTALL for a generic options to ./configure. * Configuring and Running Please, see the Pies documentation. * Bug reporting. Send bug reports to . * Copyright information: Copyright (C) 2009-2020 Sergey Poznyakoff Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn. Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions, provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last changed them. Local Variables: mode: outline paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$" version-control: never End: