[OpenIndiana-discuss] SMF "svcadm restart-or-clear-or-start" action

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-02-12 01:31, Rainer Heilke wrote:
> This is essentially what I argued for years ago, and I was pretty much
> shot down. The response was basically a suggestion that I was being lazy
> by only wanting to type one SMF command instead of two or three.


I am sure I am not unique in my laziness, and indeed this is what moves
all automation and (what some may call) progress forward :-)

Many of us admins would rather spend an hour to automate a 5-minute task
just to have the peace of mind that it is solved generally as possible
and needs not be returned to. The trick is to spend this hypothetical
hour on automating those small tasks which you would actually ever
return to, and preferably at least a dozen times ;)

In this case however, when I type "svcadm restart fmri" for a service
whose state I don't know beforehand, I must also invoke "svcs;date" to
make sure its state has indeed changed recently - and into what I need.
So this is more than laziness - some commands "copypasted" from docs or
scripted with little error-checking might not return a noticeable error
but not produce the intended result either. This is a bad thing (c),
and solving it is a step above "mere laziness".

//Jim Klimov