sysrc -- a sysctl(8)-like utility for managing /etc/rc.conf et. al.

[Garrett Cooper]

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 12:54 AM, Julian Elischer <julian at freebsd.org> wrote:
>  On 10/7/10 12:23 AM, jhell wrote:
>>
>> Alright thank you for your explanation. I do not normally see this usage
>> and this just sort of stood out at me and I did not want to assume what
>> you were trying to accomplish, without asking.
>
> three useage cases come to mind immediately.
>
> 1/ use within other scripts..
>  instead of the dozens of homegrown solutions people have written for puting
> something
> into /etc/rc.conf  one can use this.
>
> 2/ what is the value of X on machines a,b,c
>  foreach machine in a b c
>  do
>      ssh $machine sysrc X
>  done
>
>    you may well say "you could have used grep" bu tgrep doesn't give the
> default value vie the
>   hierachy of .rc files.
> 2A is of course to correc teh values found to be wrong with (2)
>
> 3/ on a really small system, without an editor this may do a cleaner job
> than the usual
>  "grep -v X /etc/rc.conf >/tmp/x;echo X >> /tmp/x; mv /tmp/x /etc/rc.conf"

    I was going to say...

3A On a system where you're logged in via singleuser, sometimes
terminal settings don't work correctly with editors (these days it's
mostly because /usr isn't available so it can't load ncurses apps,
some libs, termcap, etc). That would be a lifesaver in this case.

    But then I realized that this command probably would live in
/usr/sbin and would probably need other apps in /usr/bin // /usr/sbin
to run this command :).
Thanks!
-Garrett