Mac Geekery

It looks like through Tiger Apple has implemented the “service” command on the command line. I’ve used this with Linux and BSD where you can enable or disable services on the system. It says it’s a script.

at the command prompt type:

service —list

It also appears xinetd still runs as a process, and Apple has created an xinet.d directory in /private/etc where configuration files for the services reside.

If you do a more on the “service” script you’ll see a function for restarting xinet.

you can use the service command like this:

sudo service telnet start

and if you do that you can do:

cat /private/etc/xinet.d/telnet

and you’ll see it did this:

service telnet
{ disable = no socket_type = stream wait = no user = root server = /usr/libexec/telnetd groups = yes flags = REUSE
}

If you stop it the “disable” will become “yes”