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man rc.subr

pexp A regular expression to be passed to pgrep(1) in order to find the desired process or to be passed to pkill(1) to stop it. By default this variable contains the daemon and daemon_flags variables. To override the default value, an rc.d script has to redefine this variable after sourcing rc.subr.

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Thanks, that wasn't the point. What I was trying to say is that if you use those helpers you're looking up stuff in a man page anyway, so knowing shell scripting isn't enough any longer.

My personal opinion is that having a simple, INI-derived language is better than keeping the weirdness of the shell language just to assign a couple of variables (and you can still launch shell scripts from units anyway).

That you can import shell scripts into shell scripts is one of those things that catch many off guard when first encountered. But when grok-ed, really demonstrate how far shell script can go.

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