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From: Mike Telahun Makonnen <mtm@FreeBSD.Org>
To: Eygene Ryabinkin <rea@freebsd.org>
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Cc: gordon@freebsd.org, freebsd-rc@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Usage of the err() inside rc.d scripts
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>
> So, the question is: what is it good for and how people use it?
>

IIRC it's used in NetBSD as a fallback for very slow machines, on
which forking a large number of processes, would delay start up too
long.  It exists in FreeBSD because at the time rc.d was introduced
into FreeBSD we tried not to diverge from NetBSD too much.  The idea
was that a script from a NetBSD machine should be able to run on a
FreeBSD machine and vice versa.  However, that has been (mostly)
abandoned now and over the past few years most of the NetBSD
compatibility shims have been removed. I don't know if anyone uses
this feature on FreeBSD (embedded systems maybe?).

Cheers,
Mike.