[Dovecot] Fatal: Dovecot is already running

[Jim]

We had a power outage here last night, and when the server rebooted,  
dovecot was unable to launch properly:

8/27/09 2:08:25 AM com.apple.SystemStarter[31] Starting dovecot
8/27/09 2:08:25 AM com.apple.SystemStarter[31] Fatal: Dovecot is  
already running with PID 143 (read from /usr/local/var/run/dovecot/ 
master.pid)
8/27/09 2:08:25 AM SystemStarter[31] dovecot (115) did not complete  
successfully

When I checked the server and saw this, I simply started it via the  
command line, and it came right up, but of course that was hours  
later.  Since this script is only called at startup, would it be safe  
to just delete master.pid before trying to start dovecot?

The server here is OS X 10.5.7, dovecot is being called via a  
StartupItem.  I had originally used a LaunchDaemon for starting this,  
but ran into issues because MySQL wasn't always ready when dovecot  
tried to launch, and dovecot would never come up as a result.  Below  
is the script I'm using, which includes a check for MySQL:

#!/bin/sh

# A script to automatically start up policyd on system bootup


. /etc/rc.common

ConsoleMessage "dovecot - setting up"
# wait for mysql start up
IS_ALIVE=`/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -umysql ping | grep -c  
'alive'`

while [ "$IS_ALIVE" != "1" ];
do
sleep 5
ConsoleMessage "dovecot - waiting for MySQL"
IS_ALIVE=`/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -umysql ping | grep -c  
'alive'`
done

StartService ()
{
	ConsoleMessage "Starting dovecot"
	/usr/local/sbin/dovecot
}

StopService ()
{
     return 0
}

RestartService ()
{
     return 0
}

RunService "$1"