appendixa/sysvinit-desc.xml


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<sect2><title>&nbsp;</title><para>&nbsp;</para></sect2>

<sect2><title>Descriptions</title>

<para>(Last checked against version &sysvinit-contversion;.)</para>

<sect3><title>Program file descriptions</title>

<sect4><title>halt</title>
<para>halt notes, in the file /var/log/wtmp, that the system is being
brought down and then tells the kernel to either halt, reboot or 
poweroff the system. If halt or reboot is called when the system is not 
in runlevel 0 or 6, shutdown will be invoked instead (with 
the flag -h or -r).</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>init</title>
<para>init is the parent of all processes. Its primary role is to create 
processes from a script stored in the file /etc/inittab. This
file usually has entries which cause init to spawn gettys on each line from
which users can log in. It also controls autonomous processes required by any 
particular system.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>killall5</title>
<para>killall5 is the SystemV killall command. It sends a signal to all 
processes except the processes in its own session, so it won't kill the 
shell that is running the script it was called from.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>last</title>
<para>last searches back through the file /var/log/wtmp (or the file designated 
by the -f flag) and displays a list of all users logged in (and out) 
since that file was created.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>lastb</title>
<para>lastb is the same as last, except that by default it shows a log of the 
file /var/log/btmp, which contains all the bad login attempts.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>mesg</title>
<para>mesg controls the access to the user's terminal by others. It's typically
used to allow or disallow other users to write to his terminal.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>pidof</title>
<para>pidof displays the process identifiers (PIDs) of the named
programs.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>poweroff</title>
<para>poweroff is equivalent to shutdown -h -p now. It halts the computer and
switches off the computer (when using an APM compliant BIOS and APM is 
enabled in the kernel).</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>reboot</title>
<para>reboot is equivalent to shutdown -r now. It reboots 
the computer.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>runlevel</title>
<para>runlevel reads the system utmp file (usually /var/run/utmp), locates
the runlevel record and prints the previous and current system 
runlevel on its standard output, separated by a single space.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>shutdown</title>
<para>shutdown brings the system down in a secure way. All logged-in users are 
notified that the system is going down and login is blocked.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>sulogin</title>
<para>sulogin is invoked by init when the system goes into single user mode 
(this is done through an entry in /etc/inittab). Init also tries to 
execute sulogin when it is passed the -b flag from the boot loader 
(LILO, for example).</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>telinit</title>
<para>telinit sends appropriate signals to init, telling it which runlevel to
enter.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>utmpdump</title>
<para>utmpdumps prints the content of a file (usually /var/run/utmp) on
standard output in a user friendly format.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>wall</title>
<para>wall sends a message to logged in users that have their mesg permission 
set to yes.</para></sect4>

</sect3>

</sect2>