The init process is the parent of all other processes. This package provides a Python script as a rather minimal implementation. It takes a command as argument and spawns a sub process. Then it waits for child processes, propagates signals to them, and reaps those that are terminated. If the last child process is gone, it terminates itself.

Normally, the init process is provided by the operation system, in packages like systemd or sysvinit. The tiny-init package is useful in environments that do not have a native init process, such as docker containers.