Should NTP Processes Never End?

Question

For my NTP needs, I've installed openntpd, removed /etc/cron.hourly/adjtime, and added this line to my crontab,
* * * * * ntpd -s && hwclock -w > /dev/null 2>&1 && rm /var/lib/hwclock/adjtime
It works like a charm; however, I have noticed that the ntpd processes never seem to complete. Here's a snippet from my "ps aux" output,
root 11746 0.0 0.0 18196 468 ? Ss 02:10 0:00 ntpd -s
ntp 11764 0.0 0.0 13984 860 ? S 02:11 0:00 ntpd -s
root 11769 0.0 0.0 18196 344 ? Ss 02:11 0:00 ntpd -s
ntp 11780 0.0 0.0 13984 860 ? S 02:12 0:00 ntpd -s
root 11785 0.0 0.0 18196 340 ? Ss 02:12 0:00 ntpd -s
ntp 11796 0.0 0.0 13984 860 ? S 02:13 0:00 ntpd -s
root 11801 0.0 0.0 18196 344 ? Ss 02:13 0:00 ntpd -s
ntp 11916 0.0 0.0 13984 860 ? S 02:14 0:00 ntpd -s
And if I pipe the ps aux output through grep and wc, I see that there are over a thousand unended ntp-related processes after running the machine for 9 hours,
[root@reformedtube ~]# uptime ; ps aux | grep ntp | wc -l
02:25:19 up 9:01, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.02, 0.00
1084
Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Yes you are completely right, I normally run it in a terminal so I forgot about that (I should have read the man page better ).
You would need to do something like:
ntpd -d -s & sleep 5 && pkill -n ntpd
EDIT: or even:
ntpd -d -s & sleep 5 && kill $!
Last edited by quigybo (2010-06-21 11:39:01)