Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Understanding init Scripts and the Final Stage of Initialization

Each /etc/init.d script, or init script, contains logic that determines what to do when receiving a start or stop value. The logic might be a simple switch statement for execution, as in this example:

case "$1" in  start)        start        ;;  stop)        stop        ;;  restart)        restart        ;;  reload)        reload         ;;  status)        rhstatus        ;;  condrestart)        [ -f /var/lock/subsys/smb ] && restart || :        ;;  *)        echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|status|condrestart}"        exit 1esac

Although you can use the scripts to customize the way that the system runs from power-on, absent the replacement of the kernel, this script approach ...