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Lai Yu-Hsuan
Asked: 2011-07-26 09:25:49 +0800 CST

What's the difference between "restart X" and "/etc/init.d/X restart"?

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I normally use this command to restart my daemons(e.g. vsftpd):

$sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

Early today I noticed it said that I can try restart(8) utility. I did:

$sudo restart vsftpd

It worked. But when I tried to restart my apache2:

$sudo restart apache2
> restart: Unknown job: apache2

Why are they different? Of course I can restart apache2 by /etc/init.d/apache2

restart

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The commands start, stop, restart, etc., are links for initctl, and only work for upstart jobs.

    Calling directly the script in /etc/init.d/ will give a warning for upstart jobs, for which the use of the script is allowed for convenience, through a wrapper symlinked common script.

    Calling the service command always works, both for upstart jobs and for traditional sysv init scripts, so it is the preferred way.

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  2. You should be able to use service:

    sudo service apache2 restart
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