> To me, single-user means that only the stuff in the kernel is active --
 > everything else is shut down (possibly including LKMs but I'm not sure).
 > Multi-user means that my 'default' list of desired runnables is started,
 > in any order which is valid given the DAG established by the dependency
 > statements of the system services (does this sound like make -j ?
 > it should!)... and alternate lists of desired runnables should be
 > easy to activate, perhaps by HUPping a daemon or something.

This sounds like you may actually want to use make to drive it. Make's
a pretty powerful general-purpose process control tool, and it's good
for a lot more than doing huge numbers of stat() on .h files.

-- 
   - David A. Holland             | (please continue to send non-list mail to
     dholland@cs.utoronto.ca      | dholland@hcs.harvard.edu. yes, I moved.)