I frequently find myself writing upstart scripts which checkout ok, but for some reason don't get detected by the upstart daemon in the init directory, so when I run start myscript I get unknown job back. Some experimentation seems to indicate that the problem is I used gedit over GVFS SFTP to author a lot of these scripts.

For something like myscript.conf, I find the following fixes this problem:

mv myscript.conf myscript.conf.d
mv myscript.conf.d myscript.conf

And then hey presto, the script works perfectly.

Along the same lines, the init-checkconf utility isn't mentioned enough for upstart debugging - my last post shows I clearly didn't know about it. Using it is simple:

$ init-checkconf /etc/init/myscript.conf

Note it needs to be run as a regular user. I'm often logged in as root, so sudo suffices:

$ sudo -u nobody init-checkconf /etc/init/myscript.conf