>With run levels you can type "who -r" to see what state the machine is in.
>
>How can a script tell what state a BSD system is in?
>
>Just curious,

I suppose I should keep out of this discussion, but I just can't
resist..

I suppose one is really not interested in the run level. One might
want to know whether network is up, whether mail daemon is running
etc. I think run levels are just restrictions, because they group
together things which one might want to have up/down independently.

A set of scripts to start and stop things and config files to mark
things on/off for boot would be OK.