telling runit to pick up a new service immediately

Question

As a happy user of runit - I am curious if it is possible to send a signal to the main process (or similar) telling it to look now at the service directory? the current behaviour is < 5 seconds (seems much faster most of the time) between scans for new services - but I thought it would be nice if I could also tell it (in cases where the 5 second worst case is annoying - rare - but annoying).

Answer 1

runsvdir continuously monitors its service directory. The delay is unfortunately arbitrary. From the man page:

At least every five seconds runsvdir checks whether the time of the last modification, the inode, or the device, of the services directory dir has changed. If so, it re-scans the service directory, and if it sees a new subdirectory, or new symlink to a directory, in dir, it starts a new runsv(8) process...

The man page goes on to describe the TERM and HUP signals, both of which shut down the service. There is no mention of a refresh.