On 16-May-99 Urban Gabor wrote: > Hi, > > I've installed a program (gpm to more precise) and I want to > disable/enable it for the next booting. Remove/install every time I > want to experiment would be weird. Any ideas are wellcome
Generically, the way to prevent a program from executing is to change its permissions so that it is not executable (i.e. does not have "x" permission). My gpm has (ls -l `which gpm`): -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36515 Dec 1 1997 /usr/bin/gpm i.e. "755" permissions. If you do chmod 644 /usr/bin/gpm then the result would be -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 36515 Dec 1 1997 /usr/bin/gpm i.e. the "x" permissions would have gone and the program would not execute. When you want it back, you restore them with chmod 755 /usr/bin/gpm I'm not running a Debian system at the moment, so I can't answer for precisely how Debian starts up gpm when it boots, but in my SuSE system the file /etc/rc.d/init.d/gpm has the lines test "$START_GPM" = yes || exit 0 case "$1" in start) if test -x /usr/bin/gpm ; then echo "Starting console mouse support. (gpm)" /usr/bin/gpm $GPM_PARAM & fi ;; The "if test ... " checks whether /usr/bin/gpm exists and is executable. If not (which would be the case if you changes the permissions) then nothing is done. For what you want to do, achieving it simply by changing permissions is going to be simpler than fiddling deep inside the boot-up initialisation scripts. Hope this helps, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 16-May-99 Time: 10:34:17 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------