From the documentation: > The daemon that runs in the background and is responsible for controlling the services is shepherd, while the user interface tool is

From the documentation: > The daemon that runs in the background and is responsible for controlling the services is shepherd, while the user interface tool is called herd: it’s the command that allows you to actually herd your daemons It seems strange the the herd controls the shepherd, but I guess it fits in well with GNU's user empowerment philosophy. I'm very much a parenthesis-ophobe, but things like init configuration is a niche guile seems to be perfect for. It's terse enough to replace ini's, it's complex enough to provide structure like xml or json, it's an actual language so no one ends up writing their own and it's trivial to embed, like like lua.