tlaro...@polynum.com writes: >It seems to me, since these are services, that the failure to load a >config is critical enough (since the server may be then servicing what >was not intended to be serviced; the reverse is less problematic) >to exit at least on this error.
inetd will service what is configured. Skipping an unparsable directive may have unwanted side effects, but so will a syntactically correct but otherwise wrong directive. The impact of not providing some services in case of a syntax error can easily be as problematic or dangerous as a wrongly configured service that the parser is unable to detect. If you want to protect against bad configurations, you could separate each service, e.g. chose a syntax without side effects or even use a config file per service.
