problem with upstart: Job failed to start I got always an error message that my upstart script doesn't start. start: Job failed to start My script is: description "Tagger Version 2" start on runlevel [2345] stop on runlevel [!2345] respawn respawn limit 2 5 pre-start script mkdir -p /run/lemmatization/Lemmatizer chown nobody /run/lemmatization -R end script setgid nogroup setuid nobody exec some_shell_skript.sh The problem must be in the pre-start section, since everythink works fine if I comment it out.

Since you want to execute the pre-start stanza as root and the start stanza as nobody you have to use `sudo`. Try it with that upstart job:


description "Tagger Version 2"

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]

respawn
respawn limit 2 5

pre-start script

mkdir -p /run/lemmatization/Lemmatizer
chown nobody /run/lemmatization -R

end script

exec sudo -u nobody -g nogroup some_shell_skript.sh


As you see I removed the setuid/setgid part completely and used `sudo` instead to execute your script as another user.