offtopic: startup item / daemon / chron

Hi there, This is a newb question. I've found it hard to phrase appropriate queries about it for web / usenet searches and hope someone can set me straight. I want to create an action on bootup that starts our site search engine. They tell you how to get it running as a daemon from the shell and I am stuck on how to get this to happen everytime the machine boots. I've tried the bootup and chron sections of webmin but my syntax doesn't work. The search engine needs to be invoked from a specific directory so the command structure would be like this: change directory to xyz ./command and parameters any advice appreciated joel