On Tue, 15 Jul 2014 10:32:16 -0500 Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 10:18 AM, Jonathan Billings > <billings at negate.org> wrote: > > It also is > > significantly less-featureful than a shell programming language. > > Yes, you're going to be using shell elsewhere, but in my > > experience, the structure of most SysVinit scripts is nearly > > identical, and where it deviates is where things often get > > confusing to people not as familiar with shell scripting. Many of > > the helper functions in /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions seem to exist to > > STOP people from writing unique shell code in their init scripts. > > Yes, reusing common code and knowledge is a good thing. But spending > a bit of time learning shell syntax will help you with pretty much > everything else you'll ever do on a unix-like system, where spending > that time learning a new way to make your program start at boot will > just get you back to what you already could do on previous systems. Les, I could re-use your logic to argue that one should never even try to learn bash, and stick to C instead. Every *real* user of UNIX-like systems should be capable of writing C code, which is used in so many more circumstances than bash. C is so much more powerful, more expressive, immensely faster, covers a broader set of use-cases, is being used in so many more circumstances than bash, is far more generic, and in the long run it's a good investment in programming skills and knowledge. Why would you ever want to start your system using some clunky shell-based interpreter like bash, (which cannot even share memory between processes in a native way), when you can simply write a short piece of C code, fork() all your services, compile it, and run? All major pieces of any UNIX-like system were traditionally written in C, so what would be the point of ever introducing a less powerful language like bash, and doing the system startup in that? And if you really insist on writing commands interactively into a command prompt, you are welcome to use tcsh, and reuse all the syntax and well-earned knowledge of C, rather than invest time to learn yet-another-obscure-scripting-language... Right? Or not? If not, you may want to reconsider your argument against systemd --- it's simple, clean, declarative, does one thing and does it well, and it doesn't pretend to be a panacea of system administration like bash does. HTH, :-) Marko