SERVICE-POLICY.D(5)

📦
version 0.6build1 · 2 versions
, in ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 SERVICE-POLICY.D(5) 💖

okay bestie, this is the manual page for service-policy.d — it lives in section 5 of the man pages and it's all about the config files for policy-rc.d-declarative. let's get into it 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

/etc/service-policy.d/*.pol — the configuration for policy-rc.d-declarative 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

/etc/service-policy.d/*.pol

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the tea: the files sitting in the directory /etc/service-policy.d get opened and parsed by the policy-rc.d-declarative script. simple as that ✨

each line should have exactly three fields of data, separated by whitespace. any trailing whitespace? ignored. not important, we don't care, it's fine 💅

here's the order of operations, and this part matters:

  • all files are opened in order by file name
  • after that, all rules in a file are evaluated in order

the first rule that matches a given service with a given action gets applied. everything after that is ignored — we said what we said, the rest is not it 🙈

and if no rule matches a given service with a given action? the default is to exit with exit state 100, which signals "unknown initscript id" to the calling update-rc.d program. periodt.

🎀 FIELDS 🎀

the file contains these fields:

  1. the service(s) this should apply to. this should be a perl regular expression that matches the init scripts for which this policy should be used.
  2. the action(s) which invoke-rc.d wants to take. want more info on the available actions? go read /usr/share/doc/init-system-helpers/README.policy-rc.d.gz 📖
  3. the policy to apply to this action. the available policies are:
    • allow — allow the action that invoke-rc.d wants to perform without modification. no notes, we're letting them cook 🔥
    • deny — do not allow the action. nope. not happening. 💀
    • restart-ignore — replace the action that invoke-rc.d wants to perform by "restart stop". that is, try a restart action first; if that fails for some reason, try a stop action.
⚠️ okay important caveat bestie: at the time of this writing, not all PID1 implementations support this. notably, the systemd version of invoke-rc.d does not support overriding actions. so like… don't count on it everywhere 😭

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

  • /usr/share/doc/init-system-helpers/README.policy-rc.d.gz
  • policy-rc.d-declarative(1)

and that's the whole page, no cap 💖 this one's from 2025-12-08, straight out of the SERVICE-POLICY.D(5) era — go forth and write your .pol files like the main character you are 👑✨

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