I added a new "service definition" to /etc/xinetd.d directory and now I want to restart xinetd so the new definition is picked up.
How can I tell if xinetd actually restarted? I use su - to get to root, then kill -s SIGHUP <pid> where <pid> is the pid for xinetd as returned by ps -A|grep inet
The "right" way to do this on RedHat/Fedora is with the service command that others have pointed out. But if you want/need to use kill -HUP for some reason, you can generally tail -f /var/log/messages, many daemons will spit out something there about being restarted.
I've noticed that some services restarted with "service" say they've restarted, but if there are errrors in the configuration file they really won't have, I think autofs is one of these processes, maybe nfsd too. They'll generally have some error information in the messages log.
Also, "service xxxx restart" stops and starts the service where -HUP just usually just causes the daemon to re-read the configuration file. I can't recall an instance where this mattered to me, but I can imagine circumstancs where it might make a difference. And of course, not all daemons are run via xinetd.
Peter
