If not the force, what should I use?

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Wednesday 13 August 2008 10:40:53 Vincent Hoffman wrote:
> Jonathan McKeown wrote:
>
> >
> > People keep talking about forcestart.
> >
> > Unless I'm misunderstanding things horribly, forcestart does exactly that
> > - forces the service to start regardless of any error that may occur.
> >
> > The better option for starting something as a one-off (not enabled in
> > rc.conf) is mnemonically named onestart - which only ignores the rcvar
> > but still fails on any other error.
> >
> > And yes, I like having onestart/onestop distinguished from start/stop.
>
> I believe it "forces" a start even though its not actually enabled (in
> rc.conf) rather than regardless of errors.
> If you really want a command line of onestart/onestop install the
> sysutils/bsdadminscripts port which has a script called rconestart and
> rconestop which do exactly that ;)

No, you don't need to install anything - it's part of rc.subr.

From the rc.subr(8) manpage:

        argument may have one of the following prefixes which alters its
        operation:

             fast   Skip the check for an existing running process, and
                    sets rc_fast=YES.

             force  Skip the checks for rcvar being set to ``YES'', and
                    sets rc_force=YES.  This ignores argument_precmd
                    returning non-zero, and ignores any of the required_*
                    tests failing, and always returns a zero exit status.

             one    Skip the checks for rcvar being set to ``YES'', but
                    performs all the other prerequisite tests.

I certainly use onestart - generally when I'm configuring and testing a new 
service before enabling it in rc.conf.

I also use it with NFS. Whenever I've changed /etc/exports, I force mountd to 
reread it by issuing

/etc/rc.d/mountd onereload

Jonathan