Chapter 9. The Operating System

70

9.4 Console messages from

init.d

scripts

This section describes the formats to be used for messages written to standard output by the

/etc/init.d

scripts. The intent is to improve the consistency of Debian's startup and shut 

down look and feel. For this reason, please look very carefully at the details. We want the

messages to have the same format in terms of wording, spaces, punctuation and case of letters.

Here is a list of overall rules that should be used for messages generated by

/etc/init.d

scripts.

  The message should fit in one line (fewer than 80 characters), start with a capital letter

and end with a period (

.

) and line feed (

 \n 

).

  If the script is performing some time consuming task in the background (not merely

starting or stopping a program, for instance), an ellipsis (three dots:

...

) should be

output to the screen, with no leading or tailing whitespace or line feeds.

  The messages should appear as if the computer is telling the user what it is doing (politely

: ), but should not mention  it  directly. For example, instead of:

I'm starting network daemons: nfsd mountd.

the message should say

Starting network daemons: nfsd mountd.

init.d

script should use the following standard message formats for the situations enumer 

ated below.

  When daemons are started

If the script starts one or more daemons, the output should look like this (a single line,

no leading spaces):

Starting

description

:

daemon 1

...

daemon n

.

The description should describe the subsystem the daemon or set of daemons are part of,

while daemon 1 up to daemon n denote each daemon's name (typically the file name of

the program).

For example, the output of

/etc/init.d/lpd

would look like:

Starting printer spooler: lpd.

This can be achieved by saying

echo  n "Starting printer spooler: lpd"

start stop daemon   start   quiet   exec /usr/sbin/lpd

echo "."