oddities in /sbin/service

[Jeff Vian]

On Sat, 2006-11-18 at 05:11 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   as part of a crash course in teaching some folks scripting this last
> week, i grabbed a random FC6 script and walked through it with them.
> i chose /sbin/service since it's a nice example of several scripting
> features in a single place, but that script does have some strange
> code in it.
> 
>   first, as an exercise for the reader, what is so amusing about
> *this* snippet of script:
> 
> 
>     case "${1}" in
>       --help | -h | --h* )
> 

As standard syntax for the case statement I don't see anything funny.
Please enlighten us.

> 
>   also, based on the structure of the main argument processing loop,
> you can invoke service in some weird ways:
> 
>   $ service httpd --version
>   service ver. 0.91
> 

> where you can see that the first argument of service name "httpd" is
> superseded by "--version".  is that by design?  just curious.

> rday
>