opensolaris man page for starting

starting(7)                                              Miscellaneous Information Manual                                              starting(7)

NAME
       starting - event signalling that a job is starting

SYNOPSIS
       starting JOB=JOB INSTANCE=INSTANCE [ENV]...

DESCRIPTION
       The  starting  event is generated by the Upstart init(8) daemon when a new instance of a job begins starting.  The JOB environment variable
       contains the job name, and the INSTANCE environment variable contains the instance name which will be empty for single-instance jobs.

       init(8) will wait for all services started by this event to be running, all tasks started by this event  to  have  finished  and  all  jobs
       stopped by this event to be stopped before allowing the job to continue starting.

       This allows jobs to effectively insert themselves as dependencies of other jobs.  The event is typically combined with the stopped(7) event
       by services.

       Job configuration files may use the export stanza to export environment variables from their own environment into the starting event.   See
       init(5) for more details.

EXAMPLE
       A service that wishes to be running whenever another service would be running, started before and stopped after it, might use:

              start on starting apache
              stop on stopped apache

       A task that must be run before another task or service is started might use:

              start on starting postgresql

SEE ALSO
       started(7) stopping(7) stopped(7) init(5)

Upstart                                                             2009-07-09                                                         starting(7)