On Dec 30,  1:05am, Hubert Feyrer wrote:
>True... you mean like the one in Linux that seems to obscure what I know 
>from Irix?

Mmm, having an Irix background myself, I love chkconfig.

>I do not know what Linux added beyond that, but the above is what I had in 
>mind, as answer to your list of requirements.

Linux gives you the opportunity to specify which runstates a service will
run in.  It does this by creating symlinks on the fly in various rc.n
directories.

With the Redhat variant, you have to specify '--list' to see if a service
is enabled:

# chkconfig xfs
# chkconfig --list xfs
xfs             0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

With Suse on the other hand, without '--list', it will tell you whether
it's enabled (probably with respect to the runstate you're in, but I
haven't checked that), and with '--list', gives all the runstates:

# chkconfig xfs
xfs  on
# chkconfig --list xfs
xfs                       0:off  1:off  2:off  3:on   4:off  5:on   6:off

Other Linux variants probably have their own twist on this.

Looking at the Redhat chkconfig manpage:
       This implementation of chkconfig was inspired by the chkconfig command
       present in the IRIX operating system. Rather than maintaining configu-
       ration  information  outside of the /etc/rc[0-6].d hierarchy, however,
       this version directly manages the  symlinks  in  /etc/rc[0-6].d.  This
       leaves  all  of  the configuration information regarding what services
       init starts in a single location.

~Steve