This one has bugged me off and on for a couple years. ;-) Since I'm rebuilding my system again, I just saw the sed again, and figured now would be a good time to propose a modification.
We currently modify Sysvinit so that instead of printing:
Sending processes the TERM signal...
Sending processes the KILL signal...
when changing runlevels, it prints:
Sending processes started by init the TERM signal...
Sending processes started by init the KILL signal...
(The sed we use to make this change looks like this:
sed -i '[EMAIL PROTECTED] processes@& started by [EMAIL PROTECTED]' \
src/init.c
, just for reference.)
The book says that the original "seem[s] to imply that it is sending
these signals to all currently running processes", which it does. But
I'm not convinced that the second version is much better -- the second
version seems to imply to me that *everything* started by init, all the
way down the process tree, is being killed. The text in the book makes
it more clear that this isn't the case, but when init changes runlevels,
the book isn't necessarily handy, either.
For instance, init starts the rc script, which starts up all the system
daemons, but init doesn't kill those daemons (on its own) on a runlevel
change. That's up to the boot scripts. Sysvinit basically only kills
the gettys, and any other processes set up with a "respawn" in the
action field in inittab. (E.g., on my system I have a top instance
respawning on VC 9; init kills this process on a runlevel change, then
starts it back up once the runlevel change is complete. Well, unless
the system is being rebooted or shut down.)
Anyway, I'd propose changing this message into:
Sending inittab(5) respawn-action processes the TERM signal...
Sending inittab(5) respawn-action processes the KILL signal...
instead. (Or maybe just "inittab", if we don't want to point the user
to the inittab manpage. Or maybe "/etc/inittab". All three versions
should still fit into an 80-column display.)
Comments? Am I crazy? (OK, don't answer that. :-P)
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