Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell

StartupItems

The second mechanism, though now legacy, is still responsible for starting many system and network daemons. During system startup, the SystemStarter application scans and runs special scripts kept in /Library/StartupItems/. If you’ve installed a daemon yourself and wish to have it launch at startup and be owned by the root user (so that it is running when the first user logs in, and continues to run until the machine is shut down or it’s explicitly killed), add another item to this collection of startup items or copy or modify an existing one, if applicable. (More startup scripts are in /System/Library/StartupItems/, but, like everything else in the /System/ folder, are not meant to be messed with.)

Each object under StartupItems is a folder named after its function. Inside it are two important files: a parameter list of options in StartupParameters.plist and the script itself, which must have the same name as the folder.

Example 11-1 shows a simplified version of the contents of the Apache startup item (/System/Library/StartupItems/Apache /Apache).

Example 11-1. The Apache startup item, simplified

                     [1] #!/bin/sh

    ##
    # Apache HTTP Server
    ##

[2] /etc/rc.common

[4] StartService ()
    {
        if [ "${WEBSERVER:=-NO-}" = "-YES-" ]; then
            echo "Starting Apache web server"
            if [ ! -e /etc/httpd/httpd.conf ] ; then
                    cp -p /etc/httpd/httpd.conf.default /etc/httpd/httpd.conf
            fi
            apachectl start
        fi
    }

[5] StopService ()
    {
        echo "Stopping Apache web server"
        apachectl stop
    }

[6] RestartService () ...