6.6 The Telinit Command

When given the -T (--telinit) option, pies emulates the behavior of the traditional telinit command. This is a legacy way of communicating with the init process. The commands are sent via named pipe /dev/initctl. When the -T option is given, the rest of command line after it is handled as telinit options. The following command:

pies -T [-t n] r

tells init process to switch to runlevel r. Possible values for r are:

0 to 9

Instructs init to switch to the specified runlevel.

S or s

Tells init to switch to the single user mode.

a, b, or c

Tells init to enable on-demand components with the specified runlevel. The actual runlevel is not changed.

Q or q

Tells init to rescan configuration files.

The -t (--timeout) option sets the time to wait for processes to terminate after sending them the SIGTERM signal. Any processes that remain running after n seconds will be sent the SIGKILL signal. The default value is 5 seconds.

This usage is equivalent to the piesctl telinit runlevel command (see piesctl telinit).

The -e (--environment) option modifies the init process environment. Its argument is either a variable assignment ‘name=value’ to set a variable, or the name of a variable to unset it. Several -e options can be given to process multiple variables in a single command. Note, however, that given n -e options, the total length of their arguments is limited to 367 - n bytes.

This option provides a limited subset of the functionality offered by the piesctl telinit environ command.

The table below summarizes all options available in telinit mode:

-t n

Wait n seconds for processes to terminate after sending them the SIGTERM signal. Any processes that remain running after that time will be sent the SIGKILL signal. The default value is 5 seconds.

-e var=value

Define environment variable var as having value value.

-e var

Unset environment variable var.