This tip is about a couple of utilities to help you deal with init scripts and runlevels. Gentoo Linux has four main runlevels: boot, default, nonetwork, single. To manipulate these, use the /sbin/rc-update command. While rc-update add and rc-update del are covered in the Gentoo Docs, you may be wondering how to see the runlevels a service is in. This is done with the rc-update show command.
Code Listing 8.1: rc-update show
// Show all services and their runlevels
# rc-update show
apache2 | default
atd | default
authdaemond |
bootmisc | boot
checkfs | boot
checkroot | boot
...many more lines truncated...Note: You can also look in /etc/runlevels. Each runlevel is a separate directory and in those directories are symlinks to the various services in /etc/init.d.
Another useful tool is rc-status which made its way into baselayout with Bug #4222. It tells you which services are currently running:
Code Listing 8.2: rc-status
// Show which services are running # rc-status Runlevel: default apache2 [ started ] atd [ started ] cupsd [ started ] dcron [ started ] ddclient [ started ] local [ off ] ...and many more lines...
Finally, sometimes you may want to start all the services in your current runlevel that aren't running (because you stopped them). Simply type rc to start all the missing services.