Just a note...I ran into issues with the 'start' case statement. It was not correctly identifiying that the process was currently running using these lines:

running=`ps --pid $PID | grep $PID`
if [ $running ]; then

...because the value of running was being set to the PID & a "?" sign concatentated. The output on my system is as follows:

# cat /var/run/lighttpd.pid
21964
# ps --pid 21964 |grep 21964
21964 ?        00:00:00 lighttpd

So the if-statement was:

if [ 83222 ? ]; then


I made a simple modification so that $running is set to the count of processes instead of the setting it to a string that may containt a "?", like so:

running=`ps --pid $PID | grep $PID |wc -l`


I also added some simple echo commands, just so the output was more verbose....this is my preference, not a statement that it should be.

Here are my simple modifications:

#!/bin/sh

USERNAME=username
LIGHTTPD_CONF=/home/$USERNAME/service/lighttpd.conf
PIDFILE=/home/$USERNAME/service/logs/lighttpd.pid
HTTPD=/home/$USERNAME/lighttpd/sbin/lighttpd

PID=0
if [ -e $PIDFILE ]; then
    PID=`cat $PIDFILE`
    if [ "x" == "x$PID" ]; then
        PID=0
    fi
fi

case "$1" in
    start)
        if [ 0 -ne $PID ]; then
            running=`ps --pid $PID | grep $PID |wc -l`
            if [ $running ]; then
                echo "lighttpd is already running"
                exit 1
            fi

            echo "lighttpd does not appear to be running, but old PID file exists. Removing..."
            rm $PIDFILE
            PID=0
        fi

        echo "Starting lighttpd..."
        $HTTPD -f $LIGHTTPD_CONF
        ;;
    stop)
        if [ 0 -eq $PID ]; then
            echo "lighttpd was not running"
            exit 1
        fi

        echo "Attempting to kill process $PID (lighttpd)"
        kill $PID
        tries=""
        while [ -e $PIDFILE ]; do
            if [ "x$tries" == "x.........." ]; then
                break
            fi
            sleep 2
            tries=".$tries"
        done
        if [ -e $PIDFILE ]; then
            echo "Unable to kill lighttpd in 10 attempts. Killing with -9 flag..."
            kill -9 $PID
            rm $PIDFILE
        fi
        ;;
    restart)
        $0 stop
        $0 start
        ;;
    reload)
        if [ 0 -eq $PID ]; then
            echo "lighttpd was not running"
        fi
        kill -HUP $PID
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Usage: "`basename $0`" (start|stop|restart|reload)"
        exit 1
        ;;
esac