Understanding /etc/inittab

Sameer Naik sameer.subscriptions at damagehead.com
Sat Dec 25 18:43:26 UTC 2010


Hi,

I have been going through the inittab script for various filesystems.
I have noticed that quite a few of them specify the sysint line as
follows:

::sysinit:-/etc/init.d/rcS

I would like to know what the '-' character before the action is for.
I imagined it was to specify a login environment. I am not sure
though. Earlier when i was trying to launch an application in the
background through an init.d script, the application would just not
launch. When i removed the '-' character from the above line, i was
able to do so.

Today i found that if i keep the '-' character and launch the
application in the background using start-stop-daemon, it works fine.

Lastly, the PATH i have specified in the /etc/profile does not seem to
be available in the rcS scripts, including mdev hotplug scripts. I
have to specify the additional paths in rcS and hotplug scripts.

Looking forward to your replies.

Thanks and Regards
~Sameer


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