The processing of rc script can be suppressed by specifying the -s option on the boot command line.
The processing of the rc.boot script can be suppressed by specifying the -b option on the boot command line.
When an automatic reboot is in progress, rc and rc.boot are invoked with the argument autoboot and run a fsck with option -p to ``preen'' all the disks of minor inconsistencies resulting from the last system shutdown and to check for serious inconsistencies caused by hardware or software failure. If this auto-check and repair succeeds, then the second part of rc is run.
The second part of rc, which is run after a auto-reboot succeeds and also if rc is invoked when a single user shell terminates (see init(8)), starts all the daemons on the system, preserves editor files and clears the scratch directory /tmp. Rc.local is executed after most of the daemons are started. Normally, the first commands placed in the rc.local file define the machine's name, using hostname(1). The latter command is included in the rc.local file because the directory in which core dumps are saved is usually site specific.