One final update, incase anyone else runs across this issue: The problem boiled down to the launchd script in question being installed into the ~/Library/LaunchAgents directory. Because config files from the user's own LaunchAgent directory will cause the process to be run under that user's ID and not root, every 10 seconds an attempt was made to restart nginx, and it failed, writing to the same eby jschuur - Nginx Mailing List - English
Some additional info here and I think I've clarified that this isn't an nginx codebase issue: After a 'sudo nginx -s quit' and confirming that no more nginx processes were running or local web sites could be accessed, I was still seeing entries to the log file made, both warning me about the user directive and another permission issue: 2011/04/21 11:50:45 34505#0: bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (by jschuur - Nginx Mailing List - English
I'm running nginx 1.0.0 on a MacOS X machine, installed with brew, and when I launch nginx, even with sudo, I get the following warning in my log file over and over again: 4/21/11 2:03:42 AM org.nginx[3788] nginx: the "user" directive makes sense only if the master process runs with super-user privileges, ignored in /usr/local/etc/nginx/conf/nginx.conf:2 From nginx.conf: useby jschuur - Nginx Mailing List - English
In an attempt to centralize my common configuration data for the server block as much as possible, my document root follows a naming convention based on each site's server_name. This means I can use directives like 'root /www/$server_name/htdocs;' just fine in shared .conf file that I include from multiple places in the main sites.conf file. This works great when paths are separated with slasheby jschuur - How to...