Disable autostart for a service without uninstalling?

Question

How can I disable autostart for a service without uninstalling? For example, I'd like to leave tomcat installed, but I don't want it turning on every time I restart.

Answer 1

This should do the trick :

update-rc.d tomcat disable

Basically update-rc.d will modify existing runlevel links for the script /etc/init.d/tomcat by renaming start links to stop links.

Answer 2

The disable|enable API is not stable and might change in the future. I suggest you use the following command to remove all the symlinks in /etc/rc?.d/:

update-rc.d -f tomcat remove