Description of problem: When going to runlevel 1 ( from level 3 ), the first thing printed is : INIT: Switching to runlevel: 1 INIT: Sending processes the TERM signal But in reality no such signal is sent. I wrote a test program ( see below ) and started it in background. Then I pressed ctrl-alt-del which caused a runlevel change to level 6 and the first thing printed was : INIT: Sending processes the TERM signal then there were the subsystem messages about stopping and then at the end /etc/init.d/halt is executed, which really sends the TERM signal and then reboots. My test program printed that it received a TERM signal at the end, when /etc/init.d/halt was running and it did not report anything at the beginning of runlevel change , when init wrote that message about sending the TERM signal. In short : /sbin/init prints "INIT: Sending processes the TERM signal" when runlevel change occurs, but it does not really send any TERM signal. The message is bogus ( wrong ). My test program : #!/bin/bash trap 'echo >/dev/console "SIGNAL TERM(15) received !!!"' 15 trap 'echo >/dev/console "SIGNAL INT(2) received !!!"' 2 trap 'echo >/dev/console "TERMtest exiting"' 0 sleep 5000 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): SysVinit-2.84-7
Closing out unresolved bugs on older, end-of-lifed releases. Apologies for any lack of response. I believe it's misleading documentation; the processes referred to here are the ones specifically listed in /etc/inittab.