Stopping a daemon from running in Android's init.rc

Question

Is there a way to send some kind of event to Android init process to stop re-launching a daemon after it dies ?

Before Android 4.3, the file init.rc could be replaced, but now, it's impossible to write over it without flushing the entire filesystem.

Answer 1

You can communicate with init.rc using ctl. system properties. For example:

setprop ctl.stop media

will stop the mediaserver, and it will not restart. Use ctl.start to start it, or ctl.restart to restart it.

(These are parsed by from handle_control_message() in init.c .)