We use scripts like this for some other service-type applications on our system (though not necessarily via /etc/rc.d) a LOT. A lot of applications make the assumption that one or two instances of a given application will be installed, so they give you one 'admin' script for each instance and you issue a set of start/stop/status type commands to run it. Since we have dozens of instances running, this can be painful, so like you, we've set up scripts that reverse the order of the action. Instead of telling instance X to start, we "start" instance X.

I might suggest the following changes:

my $service = shift;
my ($action) = $0 =~ m![^/]+)$!;   # corrected per reply

$service =~ tr~/~~d;

die "$service: No such service" unless -x "/etc/rc.d/init.d/$service" 
+&& -f _;
exec("/etc/rc.d/init.d/$service", $action) or die "exec: $!";
[download]

By using the multi-argument form of exec (or system for that matter), we don't have to worry about shell metacharacters mucking us up. This is probably reasonably safe to run set-uid or via sudo.

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