Take the 2-minute tour ×  Binary is located in /usr/sbin/  When
I ran strace -o httpdstart.txt /usr/bin/httpd -k start  It has
the following lines to open the httpd.conf
stat("/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644,
st_size=35894, ...}) = 0 open("/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf",
O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3  So when loading manually via:  httpd -k
start   /usr/bin/httpd -k start  httpd loads as expected with
the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf for configuration.  I also ran
strace -o httpdstart.txt /etc/init.d/httpd -k start  i get:   So
the usage says that I cannot use any option with httpd rc
script.  So I ran strace -o httpdstart1.txt /etc/init.d/httpd
start. It does not have trace of opening any httpd.conf file.
the httpd rc script in init.d has:   i.e. its pointing to the
proper binary file.  httpd -V has the following output:  Server
version: Apache/2.2.21 (Unix) Server built: Sep 13 2011 13:46:54
Server's Module Magic Number: 20051115:30 Server loaded: APR
1.4.5, APR-Util 1.3.10 Compiled using: APR 1.4