A service that drops its privileges may not be able to remove it when it
exits. The stale pidfile is not a problem as long as the service
carefully recognizes it on its next start.
systemd would produce a warning after the service exits:
PID ... read from file ... does not exist. Your service or init
script might be broken.
Silence the warning in this case. Still warn if this error is detected
when loading the pidfile after service start.
Noticed by Miroslav Lichvar in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=752396
-static int service_load_pid_file(Service *s, bool warn_if_missing) {
+static int service_load_pid_file(Service *s, bool may_warn) {
char *k;
int r;
pid_t pid;
char *k;
int r;
pid_t pid;
return -ENOENT;
if ((r = read_one_line_file(s->pid_file, &k)) < 0) {
return -ENOENT;
if ((r = read_one_line_file(s->pid_file, &k)) < 0) {
log_warning("Failed to read PID file %s after %s. The service might be broken.",
s->pid_file, service_state_to_string(s->state));
return r;
log_warning("Failed to read PID file %s after %s. The service might be broken.",
s->pid_file, service_state_to_string(s->state));
return r;
return r;
if (kill(pid, 0) < 0 && errno != EPERM) {
return r;
if (kill(pid, 0) < 0 && errno != EPERM) {
- log_warning("PID %lu read from file %s does not exist. Your service or init script might be broken.",
- (unsigned long) pid, s->pid_file);
+ if (may_warn)
+ log_warning("PID %lu read from file %s does not exist. Your service or init script might be broken.",
+ (unsigned long) pid, s->pid_file);