Don’t expect lots of surprises this time, but an otherwise smooth maintenance release that includes a couple of minor niceties. Changes since version 0.4.1 mostly affected the logging tools (dlog, dslog and drlog):

• Logging tools now may accept input from arbitrary file descriptors, using the --input-fd command line option. This enables to do some nice redirection tricks from shell scripts and other programs which use them.

• Logging tools now support adding an arbitrary string in front of logged lines using the --prefix option. For example, this allows to send the output of several commands to a FIFO, and when reading from it it would be possible to know which command originated the message in the resulting output:

  mkfifo logpipe
  dmon cat logpipe -- dlog -t /var/log/combined
  dmon command1 -- dlog -p command1: logpipe
  dmon command2 -- dlog -p command2: logpipe
  dmon command3 -- dlog -p command3: logpipe
  

• Logging tools now handle the INT, TERM and HUP signals. When signalled, they will flush buffers to disk, and in the case of drlog check if log rotation is needed; for INT and TERM the processes will also shut down gracefully.

• The manual pages now also include the long variant of command line options.

• A number of small improvements: better error messages, removal of some unused code, updated to a slightly newer version of libwheel, better and more consistent command line parsing, silent Make rules…

Make sure you grab the tarball while it is still fresh, and do not forget that a package for Arch Linux is available in the AUR.

Update, Jan 30th: Packages for DMon 0.4.2 are now also available at the Igalia APT respoitory, for i386, amd64 and armel.

Happy 2012!