The GNU Shepherd The GNU Shepherd is a service manager written in Guile that looks after the herd of daemons running on the system. It can be used as an “init” system (PID 1) and also by unprivileged users to manage per-user daemons—e.g., tor, privoxy, mcron. It supports several daemon startup mechanisms, including inetd and systemd-style socket activation. The GNU Shepherd is configured in Guile