Error during service startup causes server to start over and over and over

Due to an oversight on my part, the path that I specified for --dbpath did not exist. This caused the service to start and stop several hundred times within 10 minutes. After 10 minutes I had a 3MB log file.

Very trivial problem, but this is not the behaviour I would expect.
Expected behaviour would be either;
1. log the error, exit the process (recommended)
2. wait until error condition is corrected.