Metad - a daemon for controlling daemons

As I progress in winding up my position at the Computing Support Group at cse.unsw I'm looking for programs that I wrote which might be more widely useful and trying to make them available to the open source community.

One such is 'metad' which you can find in my git repository at git://neil.brown.name/metad or http://neil.brown.name/git/?p=metad.

metad is a daemon for managing other daemons. It is a bit like inetd in that it starts programs and waits for them to complete. However it isn't just starting programs based on network activity - that is possible, but was a later addition.

The main purpose is to run all other little daemons one seems to need and to allow those daemons to be stopped and started remotely. It may not be very interesting on a single-user machine, but it is wonderful when administering a network