herd and shepherd ¶The daemon that runs in the background and is responsible for
controlling the services is shepherd, while the user interface
tool is called herd: it’s the command that allows you to
actually herd your daemons2. To perform an
action, like stopping a service or calling an action of a service, you
use the herd program. It will communicate with shepherd over a Unix
Domain Socket.
Thus, you start shepherd once, and then always use herd whenever you want
to do something service-related. Since herd passes its current
working directory to shepherd, you can pass relative file names without
trouble. Both shepherd and herd understand the standard arguments
--help, --version and --usage.
In the past, when the
GNU Shepherd was known as GNU dmd, the herd command
was called deco, for DaEmon COntroller.