ogs22's blog

Mac OS X: System Startup: Managing Startup Items

Having realised I did not fully comprehend the MacOSX service start up process I looked into it this morning:

In a nutshell you can do
/sbin/SystemStarter command "service" ie
/sbin/SystemStarter restart "Web Server"

the "Web Server" part is defined by the "Provides" part of
/System/Library/StartupItems/Apache/StartupParameters.plist

/System/Library/StartupItems has all the apple provided software startup
scripts /Library/StartupItems has all the 3rd party stuff (just MySQL on my system)

on boot SystemStarter is called by /etc/rc which does all the grubby stuff first - mounting disks etc..

Simple really