oddities in /sbin/service

Robert P. J. Day rpjday at mindspring.com
Mon Nov 20 09:27:59 UTC 2006


On Sat, 18 Nov 2006, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:

... snip ...

> >   also, based on the structure of the main argument processing loop,
> > you can invoke service in some weird ways:
> >
> >   $ service httpd --version
> >   service ver. 0.91
> >
> > where you can see that the first argument of service name "httpd" is
> > superseded by "--version".  is that by design?  just curious.
> >
> > rday
> >
> I would think it is. I believe that is standard behavior for most of
> the commands. If you have the --version argument, it displays the
> version information and exits.

no.  consider the differing output from the following invocations:

  $ ps aux
  $ ps --version
  $ ps aux --version

it may be that the result of doing something like

  # service httpd status --version

was deliberately designed that way, but it's certainly less than
intuitive.

in any event, the only point i was making was that, in using
/sbin/service as a sample script to show some people how scripts work,
even those people who had never seen a script before took a look at
the logic of that utility and were thinking, "what the hell ..."

rday




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