[ILUG] new grep

[Brian Foster]

  | Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 10:08:13 +0000 (GMT)
  | From: Waider <waider at dspsrv.com>
  | 
  |  >  Can you boot with init=/usr/bin/emacs yet ?
  | 
  | Tongue-in-cheek and all as the question may be, I'm pretty sure you
  | can boot with anything that knows how to find all the bits necessary
  | for its own execution (i.e. shared libs). So there's nothing (AFAIK)
  | stopping you in theory from using emacs as your init process.  [ ... ]

 yes & no.  yes, there's nothing magical about the init process,
 so more or less any binary would begin execution.  most, however,
 would then fail in various bizarre manners, as init (historically)
 lacks an environment, stdin, stdout, stderr, and (in sufficiently
 old *ix systems) has an argc of 0 (i.e., no arguments at all,
 not even its own name).  in addition, wait(2) behaves slightly
 differently --- init eats zombies --- and in many systems,
 init is not only immune to SIGKILL, but should init die (for any
 reason) the system often panics (usually, nowdays, deliberately).

cheers!
	-blf-
--
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