7

running $sudo systemctl status rc in my Ubuntu v18.04 I notices there is such a service:

● rc.service
   Loaded: masked (/dev/null; bad)
   Active: inactive (dead)

can anyone tell me what it does?

erTugRul
  • 516
Daniel
  • 71

1 Answers1

6

Debian’s systemd adds a number of links to prevent obsolete initscripts from being run:

# Those services are useless under systemd. Mask them so they can't
# be run manually by accident.
/dev/null /lib/systemd/system/sendsigs.service
/dev/null /lib/systemd/system/halt.service
/dev/null /lib/systemd/system/reboot.service
/dev/null /lib/systemd/system/rc.service
/dev/null /lib/systemd/system/rcS.service

(In systemd, linking a unit to /dev/null tells systemd that it is “masked”.)

So rc.service’s sole purpose is to ensure that running

systemctl start rc

won’t run an /etc/init.d/rc script left over from some other init system (file-rc, openrc and sysv-rc all provide this file).

Stephen Kitt
  • 434,908