[CALUG] Difference between telinit and init

[Chris Edillon]

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 22:43 -0400, James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:
> Gregory Haase wrote:
> > I don't understand why your second answer is "better yet" - It looks
> > like a CLI hack for solving a problem that already has a viable solution.
> 
> Funny, I was going to say the same thing, only in reverse. We're already 
> in CLI mode. And sleep is Ancient, occurring as early as UNIX V5. That's 
> pre-1976. Telinit, and the new init, come from System III or System V, 
> which is a good 10 years later.

  when did job control and the use of the ampersand for running
background processes appear?  or the use of parentheses for
spawning a subshell?  on ancient systems, the subshell and 
additional process would most likely have been considered more
wastful than running a single process to perform the intended
function.

> As for it being a hack, remember the Unix Philosophy: There is One Tool 
> for every job. 

  emacs?

> The sleep command is the way to delay. You don't go 
> around hacking "-t delay" into every command. It's Just Stupid!
> 
  no more so than running a program to fork a second and
then exec a third when running one process will suffice.
depends on your perspective.

> The original init process does indeed have a PID of 1, but people don't 
> generally use "telinit". They use "init" to change run states.
> 
  unless they use shutdown, reboot, halt, poweroff, ....
or on the old BSD systems, 'kill -1 1'.

chris