Re: Linux start script updates

"Kevin Grittner" <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> writes:
> I can't see a clear case either way. I know I *have* seen scripts
> which took the trouble to special-case it, but I just poked around
> and found that it seems much less common than unconditionally using
> "exit 5". Does anyone know of an environment where it matters?

Probably not. You might find it entertaining to read the current
Fedora guidelines for init scripts:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:SysVInitScript

The skeleton shown there only bothers to throw exit 5 when the
program is missing at start time.

I think though that the answer to Peter's question is that "stop" has to
be special cased to some extent, because it is not supposed to be an
error to stop a service that's not running. If it's not even installed,
then a fortiori it's not running, so the exit code *must* be 0 not 5 in
that case. I've even been told that you should get 0 if you run
"service foo stop" on a non-running service as a non-superuser,
ie, a case where you *would* get a failure (no permissions) if the
service were running. I'm not sure I believe that last bit myself,
but Red Hat has got some test scripts that think this.

regards, tom lane