Use the standard facility on your operating system. For BSD style systems, the file is usually called rc.local (in the /etc directory).
On SVR4 systems, it is quite a bit more complex -- look for the /etc/rc.d directory and see what other programs do. Often the file is called S99startup or something similar.
IMPORTANT NOTE: MiniVend must not run as root, which is the user that the startup file executes as.
The technique to start up depends on the facility of your
su(1) command. This should work on most operating systems:
su minivend <<EOF
/your/minivend/dir/bin/restart
EOF
The EOF must be the only thing on the line (no leading or trailing whitespace).
If your su(1) command has a -c option (as most System 5 UNIXes
do) then you can just do:
su -c /your/minivend/dir/bin/restart minivend
MiniVend supplies a restart script which tries to do the above portably. It works on many operating
systems (Linux and Solaris have been tested by the author.)