init6 Technology

I’ve had a question or two from friends about what init6 means or stands for. I thought I’d take a few seconds to explain.

“init 6” performs reboot in a clean and orderly manner,informing the svc.startd daemon of the change in runlevel,which subsequently achieves the appropriate milestone and ultimately executes the rc0 kill scripts.

“reboot” performs an immediate system reboot,does not execute the rc0 kill scripts,simply unmounts file systems and reboots the System. It is not recommended,especially when you are rebooting after a live-upgrade of OS & any patch-updates ,etc.

In other words “init 6″ tells the UNIX/Linux system to reboot gracefully.

For more details on the whole “init” command structure and options look here.