Startup scripts question

[Joshua Lewis]

How do startup scripts work?

I added:

mysql_enable=²YES²

But I don¹t think it is working. I had rebooted my system the other day and
my mail server stopped working (postfix reading from mysql tables) and I
tried looking at my running processes:

ps ­ax |grep sql 

and nothing was returned. So I guessed mysql was not running.

I tried:

mysql start

and I got a socket error. I usually get this error when SQL was not started
properly. So I ran

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server.sh start

And low and behold it was all working. So how do startup scripts work. Did I
add the wrong value to my /etc/rc.conf file?

Or did I miss something somewhere?

Does the entry in /etc/rc.conf correlate to the startup script. Should I
change my rc.conf file to read

mysql-server_enable=²YES²

Any advice would be welcome. Thanks for your time.