Redhat init script questions

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

It’s always bugged me that running service asterisk start doesn’t output the usual [ OK ] message to indicate things went smoothly. I took a look into the init script supplied in /contrib/init.d/rc.redhat.asterisk and found this bit of code:

if [ "x$COLOR" = "xyes" ]; then
    export TERM=linux
    daemon sh -c "$DAEMON $ASTARGS -c" >/dev/null </dev/null 2>&1 &
else
    daemon $DAEMON $ASTARGS
fi

So, I’m wondering why all output is suppressed and Asterisk is called via sh only when setting $COLOR in /etc/sysconfig/asterisk. It seems like the decision to display colours or not is up to the connecting client, and indeed when I don’t set $COLOR I still get colour in the terminal when I connect.

Essentially, it seems this code does nothing except suppress the result of the daemon function, so I’m wondering why it’s there. I couldn’t find much discussion related to the commit, and none about this specific line.