On Fri, 18 Nov 2011, Julian Fagir wrote:
When I want to restart a service like "named", I don't have to do any manual parsing; I just run "/etc/rc.d/named restart".This is the easiest case. But say, you have several rc_directories and you want to know if a specific additional service is enabled, which does not have the same name as its rc variable. Then you have to parse rc.conf, check all rc directories, check their rc variables, evaluate their rc variables and names and then check back rc.conf whether it is enabled.
No, I don't have to parse anything. Whatever external source gave me the knowledge that this additional service exists should have also told me how to start it. So I just do whatever it is that's needed.
Are you postulating a use case in which you know the script name, but don't know the directory or variable names, and you can nevertheless assume that the script follows most or all of the same conventions as the scripts supplied with the base OS?
If you know the script name but don't know the directory name, then you are somewhat stuck. {. /etc/rc.conf; echo "$rc_directories";} might help, but then you have to search the directories for the script. It would be useful to have a simple wrapper to search the directories for the right script, and pass the user-specified args to that script, but you seem to be talking about something much more complex that I still don't understand.
If you don't know the rcvar name, but you assume that the script can handle the same arguments as the base scripts, then you can use {/$dirname/$scriptname rcvar;}.
But, though it might be bad style, there's also the name variable in each rc script, still forcing you to check all scripts. If there is e.g. no /etc/rc.d/named, you would have to check all files in all rc_directories by hand for the name named you're looking for.Either a few lines of sh code or one bad-ass line of sed-sh-mix.
I still don't understand this. What might I be trying to do, and what might I already know or not know, such that the next step towards solving my problem is "check all the scripts"? What args would you pass to your wrapper to tell it exactly how to check all the scripts?
--apb (Alan Barrett)