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"Daemon best practices in Ruby?"
- We haven't tried DaemonKit
- SimpleDaemon is what we currently use, which we suspect of interfering with monit (had problems with multiple instances starting, and process not starting upon reboot).
- A couple of people suggested looking at Daemonize
- Always monitor daemons with sanity checks (e.g. memory usage); use Monit or God
- Roll your own?
"cut doesn't handle strange characters in large (5GB) text file, are there other unix commands for text file manipulation that are utf-8 compliant?"
- Try
awk/sedmaybe - Try using
od/hexdumpto figure out what the weird characters are
UPDATE 01/14/2009: Chad's corrections
Cut should be locale sensitive. Sed and Awk certainly are. Have you tried anything like:
LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 cut -n ....
I'm in the office in row closest to the ping pong table. Find me if you want to ask questions.
Cheers!
In other news, what's wrong with the daemons gem? I've used it in the past, and http://blog.rapleaf.com/dev/?p=19 resolves my key complaint.
Couple of corrections/comments:
@Kyle: I had tried the Daemons gem in the past - I forgot about it. However, it does seem too complex - multiple layers of forked out of concern over security, which we don't care about in this case.
Our current plan (at the suggestion of Brian Takita) is to write a simple loop in ruby that just drops a pid. He claims this will work fine with monit.
-- Chad
@Chad: Updated the post, sorry :)
The problem with "cut" turned out to be we were IN utf8 mode. Our data provider apparently ran out of standard ASCII characters for a single byte field of theirs and started using values above 127. So all the unix tools were seeing these as multi-byte characters and then eating the next character or so.
Switching the terminal to ASCII mode solved our problems (go figure)
Depending on the complexity of the daemon, EventMachine could be a good choice as well.
I cant remember what went wrong with daemonize but I remember I could not seem to get it working correctly