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Linux Run Levels
For the purpose of understanding how init works, the concept of the runlevel is used.
They act as a method to define what processes are started / stopped, and what users are capable of doing.
There are 10 runlevels available (0-9). Fedora currently uses 7 of them (0-6).
Processes and services are associated with a single runlevel at any one time, but can exist in different runlevels concurrently.
The system can only exist in one runlevel at a time. The runlevel to use at startup is determined by the rc script set from the information in the /etc/inittab file