INITSCRIPT

Section: Linux System Administrator's Manual (5)
Updated: July 10, 2003
Page Index

NAME

initscript - script that executes inittab commands.

SYNOPSIS

/bin/sh /etc/initscript id runlevels action process

DESCRIPTION

When the shell script /etc/initscript is present, init will use it to execute the commands from inittab. This script can be used to set things like ulimit and umask default values for every process.

EXAMPLES

This is a sample initscript, which might be installed on your system as /etc/initscript.sample.


#
# initscript   Executed by init(8) for every program it
#              wants to spawn like this:
#
#              /bin/sh /etc/initscript <id> <level> <action> <process>
#

  # Set umask to safe level, and enable core dumps.
  umask 022
  ulimit -c 2097151
  PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
  export PATH

  # Increase the hard file descriptor limit for all processes
  # to 8192.  The soft limit is still 1024, but any unprivileged
  # process can increase its soft limit up to the hard limit
  # with "ulimit -Sn xxx" (needs a 2.2.13 or later Linux kernel).
  ulimit -Hn 8192

  # Execute the program.
  eval exec "$4"

NOTES

This script is not meant as startup script for daemons or somesuch. It has nothing to do with a rc.local style script. It's just a handler for things executed from /etc/inittab. Experimenting with this can make your system un(re)bootable.

FILES

/etc/inittab, /etc/initscript.

AUTHOR

Miquel van Smoorenburg ,<miquels@cistron.nl>