Run arbitrary commands at boot time?

[Filippo Spike Morelli]

On Saturday 11 March 2006 19:29, Rocco Stanzione wrote:
[cut]
> it's too difficult for me to run an arbitrary command at boot time.  My
> complaint is that writing a proper init script, symlinking it to the
> appropriate runlevels etc. is fairly drastic overkill for a lot of things I
> might want to happen at boot time, and it wouldn't be difficult to provide
> a simple solution for this.

Just writing to support Rocco on this since I'd really like to see it 
implemented. And I happen to have a recent story about this issue. A week ago 
I installed bitlbee, so I could use irssi for IM, and by default it's ran via 
inetd. Now, for a number of reasons that do not matter I wanted it to run as 
daemon (please avoid comments on the fact it's strongly discouraged by devs, 
I know). As a result I needed an init script to start it at boot time. Since 
connection to IM servers is done upon client requests, bitlbee itself just 
sits there, so there's nothing special to do either when starting nor when 
terminating it, and this means that all you need is a on-liner, 
"/usr/sbin/bitlbee".

As pointed out by Colin, I copied /etc/init.d/skeleton and made myself a 
bitlbee init script, still it seems obvious to me that's definitely 
overkill... 101 lines bash script template for a on-liner... simply not 
worthwhile.

And honestly I havent seen any real point from those who are against this 
solution... it seems to me the only motivation is a groundless sense of 
"dirtiness" added to the boot process, which I might acknowledge but not 
support. What I could agree with is the chance users will abuse this, but 
even if this is something to keep in mind and design by, I do not see how 
risks overcome benefits.

regards

Spike

-- 
"And then the lord said to John: "Come forth and gain eternal life."
But John came fifth and won a toaster."
					
						some guy on irc