Querying service status :: A suggestion

[B S Srinidhi <srinidhi@deeproot.co.in>]

Hello list,

I'm new to this list but not to runit. :) 

I'm writing a small utility to show the status of the services being
supervised. One of the main challenges (for me) was to find the time the
service spent in the current state. e.g., how long a service has been
down, etc. I checked runit's sources to get a clue, but wasn't able to
(confidently) implement anything. (I'm not very comfortable with
tai64n) :(

I observed something in the behavior of runsvctrl and friends, but I'm
not sure. 

Whenever a service is sent a signal, the supervise/status file is
regenerated. (???) In other words, its creation time stamp gets changed.
So I thought that a simple stat() of supervise/status file could give me
the creation time and then a simple difftime() against the current
time(NULL) could give the last change status.

Is this approach *sane*??? :) If not, then could someone please explain
the correct procedure?

Srinidhi.
-- 
B S Srinidhi <srinidhi@deeproot.co.in>
DeepRoot Linux Pvt. Ltd.