I have a script I usually keep running in the background; it sets up port forwarding I use for database connections while developing an app whose details are irrelevant at the moment. Because I always want this running, I have it set to start up whenever a new shell opens – it checks if that port is in use and starts forwarding if not.
function forward {
if lsof -Pi :55433 -sTCP:LISTEN -t >/dev/null ; then
echo "redirect already running"
else
target=$(~/environment-destination.sh staging)
~/forwarder.sh 55433 stuff.rds.amazonaws.com:5432 $target > /dev/null &
echo "redirect running"
fi
}
What I want to do is to make it possible for another script, run in any shell, to stop this script and free up the port. (Primarily I want this because I occasionally want to set up forwarding to the production instance instead of the staging environment.) I tried saving the pid to a file and running pkill on it, but this doesn’t work – and pgrep doesn’t find it either. Is there a better approach?
