[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#763703: Purpose of -f

[Jesse Smith]

The purpose of the (undocumented) startpar -f flag is to read from stdin
and write whatever it finds to to stdout. That's pretty much all it
does. And it keeps going until it runs out of input.

I'm not sure why it would do that or why someone would call startpar
with that parameter since it doesn't seem to do anything useful. The
program just keeps passing stdin to stdout until it reaches an
end-of-input flag (like ctrl-d) or someone kills it. I don't even think
startpar is running the given commands (sks and shellinabox) in the
above situations as it exits after doing its input-to-output copying.

So my suggestion is: looks like someone called startpar with -f, perhaps
by accident in a script. And the -f flag should probably not have been
used in that case. And the lingering startpar processes can be terminated.

- Jesse (upstream dev)