[CALUG] Difference between telinit and init

[Chris Edillon]

On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 10:41 -0400, James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:

> >   when did job control...
> 
> irrelevant
> 
> > ...and the use of the ampersand for running
> > background processes appear?  or the use of parentheses for
> > spawning a subshell?
> 
> As I said, as early as UNIX V5.
> 
  as a self-correction, i found references to the use of "&" for
process detachment as far back as the PDP-7 days.  and job control
came in with the early versions of BSD and csh.

> >>As for it being a hack, remember the Unix Philosophy: There is One Tool 
> >>for every job. 
> > 
> >   emacs?
> 
> Funny. One tool for every *separate* job. Don't write yor own sort, use 
> the system one.
> 
  :)  an interesting note on unix philosophy: it didn't really exist
except as a vague concept until the inception of pipes circa 1972.

> >>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.
> 
> Remember, the most precious resource is Human Brain Power. Computers 
> exist to fork and run separate processes. And the Idle Process needs a rest.
> 
> In other words, don't bend over backwards to the god of Efficiency. If 
> there is a Bottleneck, do it, but otherwise, Keep It Simple.
> 
  that's fair (although i think too many folks ignore efficient
practices these days, relying on the fact that hardware becomes
increasingly faster over time).  i guess my point was, to nod
towards my Perl proclivities, "there's more than one [simple]
way to do it".

> I have always used halt and reboot. Poweroff is new and cool too. I have 
> always disliked shutdown.
> 
  right, too many option permutations based on whichever flavor of
unix you happen to be using (e.g. '-t 0' vice 'now', etc.).

chris