Do service apache2 restart and /etc/init.d/apache2 restart do the same thing?

Question

Do the two different syntaxes do the same thing?

$ service apache2 restart

$ /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Answer 1

Yes. The backward compatible /etc/init.d/ scripts basically run service myservice start/stop/retstart instead of doing anything themselves.

Answer 2

Service is nothing more than a shell script.

cat /sbin/service

At that top you will see it sets the SERVICEDIR to /etc/init.d.

The service script has a few other options such as

--status-all
--full-restart

That loop over all services. But the name you pass to it is matched to the init.d script.

Answer 3

Yes.

To be precise:

service  runs  a  System  V  init script in as predictable environment as possible,
removing most environment variables and with current working directory set to /.

(from service(8))

Answer 4

In a way, yes. Actually upstart jobs will give a warning if started with /etc/init.d/ while service command always works both for sys v init scripts as well as upstart jobs.