Editing inittab?

[Robert C. White Jr.]

in article <1166 at westmark.UUCP>, dave at westmark.UUCP (Dave Levenson) says:
> 
> I need to alter the list of daemons running under SysV/386 Rel 3.2,
> but I believe the question is applicable to most UNIX versions:
> 
> When is it ever safe to edit /etc/inittab when UNIX is running?
> The init(1) program reads this file whenever it is told to by
> telinit or init Q.  It also reads this file whenever one of its
> children dies.

According to my manual init does not re-read inittab when a process
dies.  Init builds a list of "respawn" jobs to watch over durring a
read-extract phase, and uses this table to maintain state.  If this
were not the case it would have to rescan every time a zombie or
defunct processess exited.

Init only scans the file after an init or telinit command (Q is the
init state which is equal to verify current state).  I don't beleive
that init even does the periodic stat (like cron) to check for updates.
Anyway, I have never had any problem editing inittab, and sysadm ttymgmt
dosn't do anything special to guard against tye condition you are
fretting over, so I don't think you have anything to worry about.

Rob.