On Mon, 26 Jan 2015, Michael Dukelsky wrote to mark lewis:

 BM>> While you're open to *suggestions*... is there anyway you can add 
 BM>> semaphore support to allow binkd (win32) to go into a *sleep* 
 BM>> mode to allow a nightly maintanence for logs?

 MD>> If your win32 binkd runs permanently then it is natural to run it 
 MD>> as a Windows service. To stop the service for some maintenance use

 ml> not everyone runs binkd as a hidden service... some of us prefer 
 ml> to run it in a window so we can see what's really going on

 MD> If your binkd runs 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, do you really 
 MD> watch the window all that time? :) As to me, I prefer going asleep 
 MD> sometimes.

hahaha... true but all of the machines here that run binkd (*nix, OS/2 and
winwhatever) all run binkd in a window or task so that they can easily be
viewed at any time ;)

 MD> And if the computer is rebooted, I am sure binkd starts 
 MD> automatically because it works as a service.

yeah, here, too, on all 5 or 6 of them... startup scripts work very well ;)

 ml> without having to run another process to tail the log file...

 MD> There is no 'tail' command in Windows but there are other means of 
 MD> viewing an expanding log file. For example, Far Manager allows 
 MD> viewing a dynamically growing file similar to 'tail -f' in Linux.

there is a tail available for winwhatever, though... there is (was?) one that
was separate and others that are part of *nix environment packages :)

 MD>> binkd -t stop
 MD>> and to start it again use
 MD>> binkd -t start

 ml> do these only work when binkd is running as a service

 MD> Yes, they do.

 :(

 ml> or will they also work when it is being run as a normal process in 
 ml> a window?

 MD> AFAIK no.

 :(

 ml> does it work on all supported OSes?

 MD> Only in Windows.

 :(

do you think that something like this might be able to be done for other OSes??
and also for when operating as a seperate task? some time back there was asked
for semaphores which could be used to tell binkd to freeze and close all its
files when the current session(s) were completed and it would then create a
frozen semaphore signalling that it was frozen and external maint tasks could
be performed... then the removal of the original freeze semaphore would signal
binkd to return to operation and remove its frozen semaphore that it had
created... these semaphores would be disk-based zero byte files in most
cases...

)\/(ark