Redhat – Disable colour output from /etc/init.d scripts

capistranocolorinit.dredhatservice

On RedHat/CentOS systems, all of the service management scripts in /etc/init.d (and also run by the "service" command) produce color output. (i.e. the "[ OK ]" and "[FAILED]" strings.) How do I disable this? (The color-producing escape sequences are making the webistrano output more ugly than it needs to be.)

Best Answer

Check out /etc/sysconfig/init. The top lines on my CentOS 5.x system:

# color => new RH6.0 bootup
# verbose => old-style bootup
# anything else => new style bootup without ANSI colors or positioning
BOOTUP=color

Changing the BOOTUP line to something like nocolor eliminates the formatting for all init scripts.

If you just want to disable formatting on one of your scripts, add:

BOOTUP=nocolor

after the line that reads:

/etc/init.d/functions

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Wifi – n equivalent command for ‘init.d/networking restart’ in OS X

You can bring down the network interface and bring it back up again, that should accomplish the same thing.

sudo ifconfig en0 down
sudo ifconfig en0 up

Linux – init.d scripts written in Python

I'd say #2, but very close to #1 -- "Bad. Bad. Bad. Never do this." The standard, such as it is, for Linux init scripts is in the LSB, and while it never comes out and says "these are bourne shell scripts", several assumptions are made. One, that lines beginning with # are comments, happens to work out fine. More problematic is the requirement that the init script execute the commands from /lib/lsb/init-functions "in the current environment (see shell special built-in command dot)".

But more importantly, if you're doing anything really complicated here, you're doing it wrong. The init scripts should be very simple and utilitarian. They should be scripts in the classic sense, not programs. It's better to suck it up and make a simple shell script that any sysadmin can easily grok in one quick look than to make something beautiful and engineered in Python.

Another consideration to keep in mind is systemd, which may or may not be the Future Of All System Initialization On Linux. Under systemd, initialization is done by simple configuration files rather than scripts, the idea being that all startup fits into several standard design patterns and really you should just have to pick one. If you program uses something complicated for initialization, that should go outside of the init script itself.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Wifi – n equivalent command for ‘init.d/networking restart’ in OS X

Linux – init.d scripts written in Python

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