I’m running apache on a remote server and I need to be able to bring down apache and bring it back up, my only tool that I have is telnet ,can anybody inform me on how to go about doing this in a safe way
Thank you

Well, what isn't safe these days, but I would recommend using SSH to do that type of task instead of telnet to start with.

A general startup script u can find here. If ure a user put it in ure home dir and execute from there (if uve got the access rights to starting & stopping apache), if u own the box put the script in /etc/rc.d or equivalent to ure distro and execute from there, or make it a script in ure home dir.

What safety issues?

<Gratuitous warning=on>
Safe would be using ssh instead of telnet.
Sessions tru ssh are encrypted, tru telnet it isnt.
This means if someone would sniff ure telnet session it would be easier to get ure login/pass.

If u dont own the remote box tell the owners to install & use ssh. If thats not an option u/they at least gotta to look for access control restrictions tru TCP wrappers, IPChains rules and PAM access config to name a few -basic- security measures.
<Gratuitous warning=off>

unSpawn is right - heed his warning. There are a million free and open source connection hijacking and sniffing tools that make it *ez* to take over a session, reset connections, and sniff for passwords. Go to freshmeat.net and look up 'hunt'.

Couple of ways to restart apache:

/etc/init.d/apache stop
/etc/init.d/apache start
---------or------------
ps -ef | grep httpd (or 'pgrep httpd' if your machine has pgrep)
kill -HUP <pid>
---------or------------
if it's a production box, or an active server,
'kill -USR1 <pid>'
...which will allow child processes finish up whatever they're doing before they exit.

A shortcut to finding the pid and restarting the server:
kill -USR1 'cat logs/httpd.pid' <-- note single quotes - you need those to perform command substitution in the shell.