Special Edition Using Linux®, Sixth Edition

inittab Specifics

Note

This text uses the Caldera OpenLinux inittab as illustration. Your inittab might be different, but it works the same way. After reading this section, you should be able to understand most any Linux inittab.

Reading inittab, you'll be skipping any lines that begin with a # because these are ignored by init as comments. The rest of the lines can be easily read as many other typical UNIX-like configuration tables; that is, each column is separated by a colon (:) and can be read as follows:

• id— This first column is a unique identifier for the line. This can be up to four alphanumerics long but is typically limited to two. Older systems had a two alphanumeric limitation, and most distributions haven't changed that ...