Linux Tutorial Series – 156 – init

Here is the video version, if you prefer it:

As we already learned, init is important because it is a part of the booting process, as well as a part of the user space startup process. Here we talk a little bit more about init.

init is the process which starts all system services. (Shotts, 2019)⁠ init always has a PID of 1. A lot of the services which init starts are called daemon programs – programs that don’t have any user interface and do their thing in the background.

A thing to review, if you forgot – when talking about processes in general, we can say that a parent process spawns a child process. That means that the programs that init starts are its child processes and init is the parent process.

That’s it about init. Nothing too fancy. It starts a lot of essential system services (which are daemons).

References

Shotts, W. (2019). The Linux Command Line, Fifth Internet Edition. Retrieved from http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php. Pages 134-135