Start-stop-daemon is the program that is used by the Debian style init
scripts to start and stop services. This program is part of the "dpkg"
package by Ian Jackson. However there is also a seperate C version (the
original is in Perl) available written by Marek Michalkiewicz. I am including
it for your convinience.

Note that the latest Debian dpkg packages (4.0.18 and later) contain
a much improved update-rc.d. This code is almost a year old.

The original announcement follows:


From: Marek Michalkiewicz <marekm@i17linuxb.ists.pwr.wroc.pl>
Message-Id: <199606060324.FAA19493@i17linuxb.ists.pwr.wroc.pl>
Subject: Fast start-stop-daemon in C
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 05:24:18 +0200 (MET DST)

Some time ago I wrote a faster C replacement for the start-stop-daemon
perl script.  I use it for some time now (the most recent changes were
just a nicer help screen; the code is quite stable).

This makes the system boot faster (especially on low end machines),
and important system startup scripts no longer depend on another big
package (perl).  Maybe in the future we can get to the point where
a minimal system will work without perl installed at all (packages
which need it in {pre,post}{inst,rm} scripts would depend on perl).

The only problem known so far to me is that I have to reinstall this
program after every dpkg upgrade which overwrites it with that nice
slooow perl script :-).

Just compile this program and drop the binary in /usr/sbin instead
of the original /usr/sbin/start-stop-daemon perl script (make a copy
of it first, just in case).  See below for source code.  I placed it
in the public domain, but if it has to be GPL-ed to be included in
dpkg, just tell me.  Including it in dpkg would close Bug#1670.

I am posting it here so that it can be tested by more people than
just me.  Bugs are unlikely though.

Have fun,

Marek