I haven't tracked this down yet, but it appears that when you send syslog-ng a SIGHUP while it is running with '-v', it terminates instead of restarting. # uname -a Linux syslog01 2.2.16-3smp #1 SMP Mon Jun 19 19:00:35 EDT 2000 i686 unknown # syslog-ng -V syslog-ng 1.5.8 j.