Zapping crashed services on Gentoo Linux

While configuring my first Gentoo VPS I somehow managed to crash a service and discovered that I had actually no idea how to recover it. The service no longer had any matching processes but it still refused to stop, and simultaneously insisted it was already started. Severely embarrassed I made sure nobody was looking and rebooted the server.

I later discovered that OpenRC provides a special command called zap. This command will reset a crashed service to stopped state without invoking the stop function of the init script.

Anyhow, writing zap on the command line feels strangely satisfying for some reason :-)