
Reinstall Debian init.d scripts into default runlevels
The following zsh snippet allows you to re-install any missing startup/init.d links.
This can be useful/required when e.g. installing an upstart based distribution (like Ubuntu Lucid) has removed some of those, and you want them back after downgrading to Hardy or switching to Debian testing (like I just did).
(apt-get install --reinstall
won't bring back those links; you would have to purge (apt-get purge
) and reinstall the package instead, removing any other configuration of the package though)
It basically looks for any init scripts that are not present in /etc/rc?.d/S* and then looks at the packages' postinstallation script for an update-rc.d command.
It will not install anything, but only output them (and allows you to pipe it into "sh" for execution).
Worked fine on my "messed up" system, but has rather odd results on my Maverick desktop.
Code:
for i in /etc/init.d/* ; do | |
a=( /etc/rc?.d/S*$i:t(N) ); | |
((${#a})) && continue; | |
package=$(dpkg -S $i 2>/dev/null |cut -d: -f1); | |
[[ -z $package ]] && continue; | |
echo "# $i: $package"; | |
grep "update-rc\.d $i:t" /var/lib/dpkg/info/$package.postinst; | |
done |
(in case you need to extract the init script altogether, the following might help for starters:
dpkg-deb --extract /var/cache/apt/archives/$PACKAGE.deb /tmp/foo
.)
2 comments

update-rc.d missingscriptname defaults
ciao
Mauro

From the man page:
If defaults is used then update-rc.d will make links to start the service
in runlevels 2345 and to stop the service in runlevels 016. By
default all the links will have sequence number 20, but this should be
overridden if there are dependencies.