What I intend to do

I'm attempting to make a restart script for my Minecraft server so my friends can use the /restart command in-game because they don't have SSH access to my server to restart Minecraft.

My script

Currently my restart.sh script contains

exec >> zzz.log
exec 2>&1

set -x

sleep 5

exec /etc/init.d/minecraft start

Script break down

The first two lines will redirect standardout and standarderror (as Linux fluent users will already know) into the zzz.log file, this is just so I can capture the output to help me figure what's going on.

set -x is also another part to help me figure what's going on, this will output each line that is executed into zzz.log because the above lines redirect the output to there.

sleep(5) as it suggests will make the script pause for 5 seconds, this is just to ensure Minecraft has had enough time to shutdown.

exec will make the following command /etc/init.d/minecraft start run in a different process. Since I do not know how the script is invoked, I assumed this could be a child process of the Minecraft server and thus if the Minecraft server process dies, the script will too, having it this way should ensure the command is run.

My issue

Now, if the Minecraft server is offline and I execute ./restart.sh the server starts up perfectly fine. When in-game if I type /restart the Minecraft server shuts down like its supposed to, but never re-launches again. Looking at my zzz.log file I can see the problem lays around the exec /etc/init.d/minecraft start command, this line is never successfully executed when Minecraft executes the restart.sh script. Why is this?

init script

I obtained the init script from here. This allows me to start, stop, restart the Minecraft server along with various other commands to control the Minecraft server.