Difference between telinit and init on a system using systemd
 

What is the difference between the init command and telinit on a Linux os with systemd such as Fedora? On other systems without systemd, one is a symbolic link to
the other. On my Fedora 16 system, one is not a symbolic link to the other, and they are not the same binary because differ in size.

Review the cheatsheet here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SysVin...emd_Cheatsheet
In all likelihood telinit is a symlink to systemctl.

Why the need for 2 commands that do exactly the same thing then?

It's a compatibilities / sensibilities approach. SysV-style init has been around for ages; it's what all of us old-school admins know; it is also a brittle, loathsome mess. However, systemd, for all of its perks, may not yet be ready for prime-time (I'm talking production environments - I have yet to implement a switch to it in such an environment, although I'm considering doing so at my upcoming job). So, they compromise. Hell, for a long time there was a compromise built into some distros and other UNIX-like systems, which would use either have a symlink named telinit that linked to init, with the capabilities of acting like telinit built in, or a standalone telinit that also had its utility built in to a standalone init. A lot of this double-duty crap is fairly common at the legacy systems level, because it is foundational and expected to work a certain way by a great number of stodgy admins with huge farms of established systems.

I would suggest you learn everything you can about systemd, since that is the future of stable production systems, and use it. Forget SysV - the reason it is so simple to set up and use is because it has to be. Exploiting the backwards compatibility of systemctl by calling it as telinit is only masking the complexity of what is really going on now.

/rant

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html