init

thumb|Version 7 Unix: listing, showing and thumb|Version 7 Unix: contents of an Bourne shell script

In Unix-like computer operating systems, init (short for initialization) is the first process started during booting of the operating system. Init is a daemon process that continues running until the system is shut down. It is the direct or indirect ancestor of all other processes and automatically adopts all orphaned processes. Init is started by the kernel during the booting process; a kernel panic will occur if the kernel is unable to start it or if it dies for any reason. Init is typically assigned process identifier 1.