I've developed recently a runlevel shell script for a java service. I've developed a simple one based on the criteria that it must be adapted to every particular flavor of linux (Ubuntu and SuSE have their particular skeleton files to place a new server, so I imagine that in every case is different.

Here is my script (see below). Once launched the java process as a background server with the & command, it saves the current pid file with the $! special variable, who has the last backgrounded process.

With that I can stop then the process issuing a gentle kill and then a hard kill (just in cas the process is hung).

#!/bin/bash
#
# java_service.sh  - to start / stop a java based service
#
#
 
 
JAVA_HOME=PUT-HERE-YOUR-JAVA-HOME
JAVA=$JAVA_HOME/bin/java
 
PID_FILE=$SERVER_HOME/pidfile
 
case $1 in
start)
    echo "Starting PUT-YOUR-NAME server"
    sudo -u USERNAME $JAVA -jar myjar.jar
    echo $! > "$PID_FILE"
    echo "done"   
    ;;
stop) 
    echo "Stopping PUT-YOUR-NAME server"
    # first make a gentle kill 
    kill $(cat "$PID_FILE")  
    # then sleep and make a hard kill 
    sleep 4s
    kill -9 $(cat "$PID_FILE")
    rm $(cat "$PID_FILE")
    echo "done"
    ;;
reload)
    $0 stop
    $0 start
    ;;
status)
    if kill -0 $(cat "$PID_FILE") ; then 
        echo "PUT-YOUR-NAME server is running"
    else
        echo "PUT-YOUR-NAME server has stopped"
    fi
    ;;
*)
    echo "Usage: $0 start | stop | status "
    ;;
esac