Is there a good reason to write my own daemonize function instead of using daemon(3)?

Question

There are a lot of example implementations of daemons on the net. Most that I saw do not use the daemon(3) function to run the program in the background. Is that just a matter of taste, ignorance, or is there a good reason to write my own daemonize function? Is there a specific disadvantage in using daemon(3)? Is it insecure?

Answer 1

The daemon() function was not historically available in all flavors of Unix, so a lot of "portable" code doesn't use it. There's really no reason to roll your own recipe as long as all the target platforms you care about have daemon().