I have two Apache instances setup in my server (Solaris 10): Instance 1: /etc/apache2 Instance 2: /etc/apache2-instance2 To start the instance 1, I execute the following command: /usr/apache2/bin/apachectl -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf And instance 2: /usr/apache2/bin/apachectl -f /etc/apache2-instance2/httpd.conf Both instances run perfectly, however the problem comes when I want to stop the instances. I have not been able to find a parameter to indicate what instance I want to stop. if I execute this command: /usr/apache2/bin/apachectl -k stop It will stop always the Instance 1 (the default one). The only solution that I could find to stop the instance 2 was to do this: kill -TERM 'cat /var/run/apache2-instance2/httpd.pid' Is this the only way to do it? or what is the best solution? I remember that I did something similar in Ubuntu setting a the global variable APACHE_CONFDIR before calling apachectl