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RC.D(8) System Manager's Manual RC.D(8)

rc.d — daemon control scripts

/etc/rc.d/daemon [-df] action

The /etc/rc.d directory contains shell scripts to start, stop, and reconfigure daemon programs (“services”).

Services installed from packages(7) may be started at boot time in the order specified by the pkg_scripts variable from rc.conf(8); the order will be reversed during shutdown. Services comprising OpenBSD base are started by rc(8).

The options are as follows:

Setting this option will print the function names as they are called and prevent the rc.subr(8) framework from redirecting stdin and stderr to /dev/null. This is used to allow debugging of failed actions.
This option only affects the start action. It will forcibly start the daemon whatever value daemon_flags is set to. If daemon_flags is set to “NO”, execution will continue with the script's own defaults unless other flags are specified.

Each such script responds to the following actions:

Start the service, if not already running.
Stop the service.
Tell the daemon to reload its configuration.
Perform a stop, then a start.
Return 0 if the daemon is running or 1 if it is not.

Daemon control scripts use a fixed number of sh(1) variables when starting a daemon. The following two can be overridden by site-specific values provided in rc.conf.local(8):

daemon_flags
Arguments to call the daemon with. If set to “NO”, it will prevent the daemon from starting even when listed in pkg_scripts.
daemon_user
User to run the daemon as, using su(1).

To obtain the actual variable names, replace daemon with the name of the script. For example, postgres is managed through /etc/rc.d/postgresql. To run the daemon using a site-specific user account, define the following in rc.conf.local(8):

postgresql_user=mypgsqluser

Each script may define its own defaults, as explained in rc.subr(8).

daemon_class is a special read-only variable. It is set to “daemon” unless there is a login class configured in login.conf(5) with the same name as the rc.d script itself, in which case it will be set to that login class.

/etc/rc.d/
Directory containing daemon control scripts.
/etc/rc.d/rc.subr
Functions and variables used by rc.d scripts.
/var/run/rc.d/
Directory containing files recording the pexp variable used by pkill(1) for currently running daemons.

rc(8), rc.conf(8), rc.subr(8)

The /etc/rc.d directory first appeared in OpenBSD 4.9.

September 1, 2012 OpenBSD-5.4