Solaris 10 has a service management system that's basically the master script that you alluded to with a lot of metadata. It's one of the nicer parts of the OS.

Solaris 10 has a service management system that's basically the master script that you alluded to with a lot of metadata. It's one of the nicer parts of the OS. Of course, it's also on its way out (even the DoD is planning to leave it behind). For your purposes, I'd just write start and stop scripts that read a list of processes from a file. That way, you don't have to worry about changing the order in all your scripts whenever you add or remove a process from your system - just edit your process.order file and you're set. Also, there are several ways to kill a process by name on a Unix box, and that's preferable to storing your PID's.