Can anyone explain the use of init3

[Kenneth Porter]

On Wednesday, April 19, 2006 2:53 PM +0100 Chris Linton-Ford 
<chris.lintonford at firebox.com> wrote:

> On my FC5 install telinit is symlinked to init, so no odds in which gets
> used.

Many programs are installed under multiple names this way, and the name 
used to launch the program tells the program what you want it to do. For 
example, sendmail is linked to mailq. When invoked as sendmail, it sends 
mail. When invoked as mailq, it lists the mail queue. But it's the same 
binary.

When your objective is to change the runlevel, you should invoke telinit. 
Future versions of the program may treat invocation as init to do something 
quite different.