4. Daemons

Many Linux distributions run daemons most of us will never use. Most of these daemons are loaded by scripts. Where these scripts are and what they are called depends on your Linux distribution. Slackware set-up scripts are buried in /etc/rc.d/rc.*.

Before you proceed, a knowledge of Unix shell script programming would be a definite asset. However, if you have no experience writing Unix shell scripts, what follows is probably the quickest introduction to shell script programming ever written.

Take the following shell script:

#!/bin/sh echo "hello world" 
			#echo "good bye cruel world"

The previous code will echo the string "hello world". Shell scripts must contain the the line

"#!/bin/sh"

at the very top line. After that every line is executed as if you had typed it at the keyboard (think of shell scripts as nothing more then glorified keyboard macros).

Lines which begin with a '#' are said to be commented out because they do not get executed by the shell. Most start-up scripts when they load daemons look like:

if somecondition 
		        do something 
				  fi

What you want to do is comment out every line starting with the

if

statement and ending with the

fi

statement.

If you want to find where a daemon is loaded, search the start-up scripts for the name of the daemon. If I wanted to find where inetd is loaded in Slackware I would do the following:

$ cd /edt/rc/d $grep -n inetd rd.*