Chkconfig For Linux

Chkconfig is a tool for managing the collection of symbolic links found in the /etc/rc[0-6].d directories, on System V derived UNIX systems. The project saves the system administrator from the tedium of manually managing the scores of symbolic links.

SGI originally created chkconfig and shipped it with their IRIX operating system. In 1993, Italo Lisi and Luigi Genoni created a script version of chkconfig for Linux. Several years later, RedHat independently created their own C version of the same idea, which is the basis for the code provided here.

In this version, an autoconf style configure script is added, as well as some detection for the /etc/rc.d directory (eg. '/etc' under Solaris). I sent patches to RedHat based on their RedHat-5.2 version, but never received any communication back.

It seemed like a generally useful tool, especially for porting RPM spec files to Solaris, so I'm making it available here.

The newest version (1.3.30a) is based on the version shipped with Fedora Core 6. I have only tested it under Debian, but should compile easily on other distributions if you have a library supporting the getopt_long() function.

The installation procedure is the standard GNU one:

 ./configure  make  make install

which should detect the configuration your OS uses and compile the program with the correct defaults. If it is unable to determine the initscript directories for your platform, there are specific options documented in INSTALL. (Please also email the author the options you gave to configure, so that the sources can be modified to automatically support your system.)

You can also pass the --disable-ntsysv option to configure to skip compilation of that program. Similarly, --disable-alternatives skips compilation of the alternatives program.