I have a program I want to run as a process on a Linux system, from system startup. What script do I modify to invoke it?
My embedded Linux Primer does not have a general description of the system start sequence, and searching through the directories for the appropriate file is a needle in a haystack scenario.
Linux has a series of “run levels” associated with the various states of the system. For example, run level 1 is single user mode, run level 3 is text-based multi-user mode, and run level 5 is gui-based multi-user mode.
You can write a script (or daemon) to be started or stopped as the system goes through each run level. The can be configured with the chkconfig command.
There is a decent overview of how it works here
There are ways to manipulate this information in the GUI, but being a command-line sort of guy I’ll let others elaborate on that.
Another alternative is to write a cron script (that you can install with crontab) to run every so often and start your script if necessary.