3 deco and dmd

The daemon that runs in the background and is responsible for controlling the services is dmd, while the user interface tool is called deco, the DaEmon COntroller¹. To perform an action, like stopping a service or calling an action of a service, you use the deco program. It will communicate with dmd over a Unix Domain Socket.

Thus, you start dmd once, and then always use deco whenever you want to do something service-related. Since deco passes its current working directory to dmd, you can pass relative file names without trouble. Both dmd and deco understand the standard arguments --help, --version and --usage.