Commanding rc.local not to run at boot..possible.?

[Paul Howarth]

Jeff Vian wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-04-10 at 22:00 -0400, Claude Jones wrote:
> 
>>Mark Sargent wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hi All,
>>>
>>>have a script in rc.local that hangs the machine at boot(I was seeing 
>>>if the system here at home would do the same as my work PC, which it 
>>>did, unfortunately). How can I instruct the boot process not to 
>>>process rc.local. Is it possible from the command line to do this, and 
>>>could you tell me what the command would be.? Knoppix3.7 doesn't 
>>>recognize LVM, so I can't mount the partition and make a change to 
>>>rc.local and booting with telinit 3 still gets the hang. Cheers.
>>>
>>>Mark Sargent.
>>>
>>
>>I just went through this, and reading through the posts, I'm surprised 
>>no one mentioned this:
>>Right after the kernel is unpacked in the beginning of boot, you get a 
>>dialogue telling you to press 'I' for interactive mode. Do that, and 
>>each command in the bootup gives you a Y/N dialogue. rc.local should be 
>>the very last command, and it will say something like 'start local? Y|N' 
>>pressing N will bypass rc.local.
>>
> 
> 
> Claude,
> 
> Have you tried that and made it work?   8-)
> 
> This is what I see in rc.sysinit (which gives that message).
> -------------------------------------
> if [ "$PROMPT" != "no" ]; then
>  echo -en $"\t\tPress 'I' to enter interactive startup."
>  echo
> fi
> -------------------------------------
> 
> I don't find anything in the script to ever even read the input, let
> alone assign the input to a variable or use it. 
> 
> If you can tell me where it is ever assigned/used in the script I would
> appreciate it.  Maybe I can learn something about scripting. :-)

The snippet above is what produces the prompt to press the "I" key. The 
key isn't read until *much* later. Search for "getkey" in 
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit. If the "I" key is detected as having been pressed 
at the appropriate time, the file /var/run/confirm is created, and the 
presence or absence of this file is used by /etc/rc.d/rc to determine 
whether or not it should prompt for whether each individual initscript 
should be run.

Paul.