Later there was an attempt to split out some parts of
<filename>/etc/rc
</filename> for the sake of starting the most important subsystems separately. The notorious example was
<filename>/etc/netstart
</filename> to bring up networking. It did allow for accessing the network from single-user mode, but it did not integrate well into the automatic startup process because parts of its code needed to interleave with actions essentially unrelated to networking. That was why
<filename>/etc/netstart
</filename> mutated into
<filename>/etc/rc.network
</filename>. The latter was no longer an ordinary script; it comprised of large, tangled
<citerefentry><refentrytitle>sh
</refentrytitle><manvolnum>1
</manvolnum></citerefentry> functions called from
<filename>/etc/rc
</filename> at different stages of system startup. However, as the startup tasks grew diverse and sophisticated, the
<quote>quasi-modular
</quote> approach became even more of a drag than the monolithic
<filename>/etc/rc
</filename> had been.