[CALUG] How do I get out of X?

[Chris Edillon]

On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 01:51 -0400, Dave Dodge wrote:

  hey dave.

> On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 09:33:43PM -0400, Rajiv Gunja wrote:
> > Again, I would have to say it is the other way around. init is the
> > mother or parent of all programs. It was thought to be unwise to
> > direct commands to it directly. So the programmers of Unix wrote a
> > program called "telinit" to "tell" init what to do.
> 
> Here's some wild speculation as to how it went:
> 
>   - Originally there were very few things init needed to be able to
>     do, and a few signals such as HUP and TERM would be sufficient to
>     tell it to do those things.  No need for something like "telinit".

  this bears out looking through the release 7 man pages.  init
would come up initially in what we think of as single user mode,
and an administrator would have to exit the single user shell
to enter multi-user mode.  at that point, a HUP would send init
back to single user mode.

> The fact remains that it only works because init/telinit doesn't
> bother to check argv[0] like other combined programs usually do.  You
> could presumably run "telinit" with PID 1 and get the init daemon
> behavior -- or give it a third name and use that likewise.

  i just tried this by passing init=/sbin/telinit to the kernel
via GRUB, and it works just fine.  not that it's of any real
use, but it's interesting.  :)

chris