The GNU Daemon Shepherd or GNU Shepherd, formerly known as GNU dmd, is a service manager that looks after the herd of system services. It provides a replacement for the service-managing capabilities of SysV-init (or any other init) with a both powerful and beautiful dependency-based system with a convenient interface. It is intended for use on GNU/Hurd, but it is supposed to work on every POSIX-like system where Guile is available. In particular, it is used as PID 1 by GNU Guix. page 