what form of script? What should be the state of mysqld when each of these is run? Why mysqld_safe? mysqld might be a better option depending on what you are trying to achieve.

The "--pre-script" part could probably already be done with mysqld_safe's --mysqld option.

$ mysqld_safe --help

Usage: /usr/bin/mysqld_safe [OPTIONS]

...

  --mysqld=FILE              Use the specified file as mysqld

...

https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/mysqld_safe/#specifying-mysqld

And then the "mysqld" that you pass to this option could probably just be a script that does something like:

mysqld_pre_script.sh

mysqld $@

I don't think there is currently a way to tell mysqld_safe to run a script after mysqld finishes startup/crash recovery though.

For the post-startup/crash recovery request, maybe it would make sense to add a new mysqld option similar to init_file that runs a shell script after the server starts up? Maybe it could be called something like init_shell or init_script to keep the name kind of similar to init_file and init_connect?

https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/server-system-variables/#init_file

If it was systemd you could just drop in a ExecStartPost script like

/etc/systemd/system/mariadb.service.d/loadkeys.conf:

[Service]

ExecStartPost=mysql -e 'source ... /loadkeys.sql'