Recs.
Updated
System V style init programs originally written by Miquel van Smoorenburg that control the booting and shutdown of your system.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Configuration based in text files, nothing hidden in the system as it can be done with binary configuration files
Cons
Con Duplicated implementation for every service
Every init script needs to reinvent the wheel for every script: argument processing, start/stop/restart/reload/status/whatever processing, finding/clearing/creating PID files, sourcing defaults, building and setting configuration options, so on and so forth.
Con Launches a bunch of processes to launch a process
Every init script spawns at least sh/dash/bash, and probably also additional processes such as cat, echo, start-stop-daemon, etc, just to start a single daemon that may not even be needed at the time of boot. This massive overhead results in poor performance, and is a killer for embedded systems.
Con Awkward runtime dependency handling
Comes with a directory tree of symlinks to handle the runtime dependencies with links like S01whatever and K11whatever to start/stop services in a specific runlevel. Writing init scripts that conform to the LSBInit standard of LSB, which does allow to define the dependencies in the script header, doesn't always get you covered.