The ticket was closed as invalid with this comment:
"This doesn't looks like a problem in nginx. Rather, it's an incorrect assumption in init.d script you use - looks like it tries to grep nginx.conf for the "pid" directive, and fails to do it properly. Ask your package maintainer for a refund."
Indeed, /etc/init.d/nginx does this:
PID=$(awk -F'[ \t;]+' '/[^#]pid/ {print $2}' /etc/nginx/nginx.conf)
Which finds the (unintended) wrong line in my config file. I've implemented a work-around for now (changing the "p" in "spider" to "\160"). Now I just need to find the right place to report the bug. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and this worked fine with 12.04 LTS. The nginx script has definitely changed from 12.04 to 14.04.
"This doesn't looks like a problem in nginx. Rather, it's an incorrect assumption in init.d script you use - looks like it tries to grep nginx.conf for the "pid" directive, and fails to do it properly. Ask your package maintainer for a refund."
Indeed, /etc/init.d/nginx does this:
PID=$(awk -F'[ \t;]+' '/[^#]pid/ {print $2}' /etc/nginx/nginx.conf)
Which finds the (unintended) wrong line in my config file. I've implemented a work-around for now (changing the "p" in "spider" to "\160"). Now I just need to find the right place to report the bug. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and this worked fine with 12.04 LTS. The nginx script has definitely changed from 12.04 to 14.04.