stalepid - check for stale pid files and remove them

Description

The stalepid utility was developed to facilitate the startup of servers that write their process ID to a file and refuse to start if that file exists (e.g. when the process was last terminated by an unclean shutdown, or simply killed, not given the chance to clean up the process ID file). The stalepid utility is used to check for and possibly remove those stale process ID files. Upon its invocation, stalepid checks for the following conditions:

• the file specified by the pidfile argument exists;
• it contains a single line, and the line contains a single number;
• there is no process with the process ID specified in the file, or if there is one, it is not named the same as the processname argument.

If all those conditions are met, the stalepid utility will remove the file specified by the pidfile argument, thus allowing the next invocation of the server to proceed normally.

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