# What can I put in /etc/rc.conf  ?



## humphrayLegare (Mar 22, 2019)

I wanted to share that for new comers.

Have you ever wonder what are all the options I could put in /etc/rc.conf ? I have been wondering about that question yesterday. Found out one has to read :

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?rc.conf(5)

And as well you could check :

/etc/defaults/rc.conf 

and read about all of their default.


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## ralphbsz (Mar 22, 2019)

Thank you for pointing that out. But there is also the converse to consider: There are lots of things that one should NOT put in rc.conf.  For example, you might have a program that needs to be run once during booting, in my case to initialize an unusual piece of hardware.  Do not put a call to that program in rc.conf, because rc.conf will be executed many times over, often at inappropriate times!  This is a mistake I've seen other people do multiple times too.  There are many places initialization programs can be put in various placed; I decided to put it in the start function of a related service in /etc/rc.d/... (because it does special hardware initialization for stuff needed for a service, in my case an old parallel printer connected to an unusual motherboard with a non-standard parallel port).


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 22, 2019)

Or just plain `man rc.conf` on your FreeBSD system. No need to go to the web for the man file.


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