I just wanted to quickly second this issue, but I solved it by just unquoting OPTIONS where it is used later in the file:

    -- "$OPTIONS" \

to

    -- $OPTIONS \

I just wanted to say thank you! Reading your post spared me a lot of headaches!

I manually installed ddclient 3.11.0 from github on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS following the manual installation guide from github: https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient#ma … stallation

Additional to the change that you proposed I had to make another change in /etc/init.d/ddclient swapping:

DAEMON=/usr/sbin/$NAME
to
DAEMON=/usr/bin/$NAME

Other tips that I have is to double check that you're using /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf
I believe in earlier versions it was using /etc/ddclient.conf by default so make sure that you're using the correct file location for the config in case you're upgrading.

And finally it's not necessary to have "daemon" or "pid" statements in /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf
If you're using the default /etc/systemd/system/ddclient.service
since that already passes deamon and pid via command line argmunets.

I hope this is helpful for someone else who also finds this thread through Google like me.

I solved it by just unquoting OPTIONS where it is used later in the file

Yes, word splitting is needed to avoid passing the options as a single string.

A bug has been filed: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … bug=998650

No action yet though.

    -- "$OPTIONS" \

to

    -- $OPTIONS \

followed by the very long usage message.

After some fiddling around I finally (?) fixed this by moving the options from the command line to the config file :-

The following was added to /etc/ddclient.conf :-

daemon=300
pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid
syslog=yes

and then edited /etc/init.d/ddclient to set OPTIONS to be empty :-

OPTIONS=""

This then seems to work!

/etc/init.d/ddclient start
/etc/init.d/ddclient status
Status of Dynamic DNS service update utility: ddclient is running.

Geoff