Produces output similar to

  UNIT                         LOAD   ACTIVE SUB     DESCRIPTION


  sys-module-fuse.device       loaded active plugged /sys/module/fuse


  -.mount                      loaded active mounted Root Mount


  boot-efi.mount               loaded active mounted /boot/efi


  systemd-journald.service     loaded active running Journal Service


  systemd-logind.service       loaded active running Login Service
● user@1000.service            loaded active running User Manager for UID 1000
...


  systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer loaded active waiting Daily Cleanup of Temporary Directories
LOAD   = Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded.
ACTIVE = The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of SUB.
SUB    = The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit type.
123 loaded units listed. Pass --all to see loaded but inactive units, too.
To show all installed unit files use 'systemctl list-unit-files'.


            

The header and the last unit of a given type are underlined if the terminal supports that. A colored dot is shown next to services which were masked, not found, or otherwise failed.

The LOAD column shows the load state, one of loaded, not-found, bad-setting, error, masked. The ACTIVE columns shows the general unit state, one of active, reloading, inactive, failed, activating, deactivating. The SUB column shows the unit-type-specific detailed state of the unit, possible values vary by unit type. The list of possible LOAD, ACTIVE, and SUB states is not constant and new systemd releases may both add and remove values.

systemctl --state=help

command maybe be used to display the current set of possible values.

This is the default command.

LISTEN           UNIT                        ACTIVATES
/dev/initctl     systemd-initctl.socket      systemd-initctl.service
...
[::]:22          sshd.socket                 sshd.service
kobject-uevent 1 systemd-udevd-kernel.socket systemd-udevd.service
5 sockets listed.

Note: because the addresses might contains spaces, this output is not suitable for programmatic consumption.

Also see --show-types, --all, and --state=.

NEXT                         LEFT          LAST                         PASSED     UNIT                         ACTIVATES
n/a                          n/a           Thu 2017-02-23 13:40:29 EST  3 days ago ureadahead-stop.timer        ureadahead-stop.service
Sun 2017-02-26 18:55:42 EST  1min 14s left Thu 2017-02-23 13:54:44 EST  3 days ago systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service
Sun 2017-02-26 20:37:16 EST  1h 42min left Sun 2017-02-26 11:56:36 EST  6h ago     apt-daily.timer              apt-daily.service
Sun 2017-02-26 20:57:49 EST  2h 3min left  Sun 2017-02-26 11:56:36 EST  6h ago     snapd.refresh.timer          snapd.refresh.service


            

NEXT shows the next time the timer will run.

LEFT shows how long till the next time the timer runs.

LAST shows the last time the timer ran.

PASSED shows how long has passed since the timer last ran.

UNIT shows the name of the timer

ACTIVATES shows the name the service the timer activates when it runs.

Also see --all and --state=.

Note that glob patterns operate on the set of primary names of units currently in memory. Units which are not active and are not in a failed state usually are not in memory, and will not be matched by any pattern. In addition, in case of instantiated units, systemd is often unaware of the instance name until the instance has been started. Therefore, using glob patterns with start has limited usefulness. Also, secondary alias names of units are not considered.

This command should not be confused with the daemon-reload command.

Note that restarting a unit with this command does not necessarily flush out all of the unit's resources before it is started again. For example, the per-service file descriptor storage facility (see FileDescriptoreStoreMax= in systemd.service(5)) will remain intact as long as the unit has a job pending, and is only cleared when the unit is fully stopped and no jobs are pending anymore. If it is intended that the file descriptor store is flushed out, too, during a restart operation an explicit systemctl stop command followed by systemctl start should be issued.

This is similar to changing the runlevel in a traditional init system. The isolate command will immediately stop processes that are not enabled in the new unit, possibly including the graphical environment or terminal you are currently using.

Note that this is allowed only on units where AllowIsolate= is enabled. See systemd.unit(5) for details.

Freezing the unit will cause all processes contained within the cgroup corresponding to the unit to be suspended. Being suspended means that unit's processes won't be scheduled to run on CPU until thawed. Note that this command is supported only on systems that use unified cgroup hierarchy. Unit is automatically thawed just before we execute a job against the unit, e.g. before the unit is stopped.

This is the inverse operation to the freeze command and resumes the execution of processes in the unit's cgroup.

This function is intended to generate human-readable output. If you are looking for computer-parsable output, use show instead. By default, this function only shows 10 lines of output and ellipsizes lines to fit in the terminal window. This can be changed with --lines and --full, see above. In addition, journalctl --unit=NAME or journalctl --user-unit=NAME use a similar filter for messages and might be more convenient.

systemd implicitly loads units as necessary, so just running the status will attempt to load a file. The command is thus not useful for determining if something was already loaded or not. The units may possibly also be quickly unloaded after the operation is completed if there's no reason to keep it in memory thereafter.

Example 1. Example output from systemctl status

$ systemctl status bluetooth
● bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service


   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)


   Active: active (running) since Wed 2017-01-04 13:54:04 EST; 1 weeks 0 days ago


     Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)


 Main PID: 930 (bluetoothd)


   Status: "Running"


    Tasks: 1


   Memory: 648.0K


      CPU: 435ms


   CGroup: /system.slice/bluetooth.service


           └─930 /usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd
Jan 12 10:46:45 example.com bluetoothd[8900]: Not enough free handles to register service
Jan 12 10:46:45 example.com bluetoothd[8900]: Current Time Service could not be registered
Jan 12 10:46:45 example.com bluetoothd[8900]: gatt-time-server: Input/output error (5)

The dot ("●") uses color on supported terminals to summarize the unit state at a glance. White indicates an "inactive" or "deactivating" state. Red indicates a "failed" or "error" state and green indicates an "active", "reloading" or "activating" state.

The "Loaded:" line in the output will show "loaded" if the unit has been loaded into memory. Other possible values for "Loaded:" include: "error" if there was a problem loading it, "not-found" if not unit file was found for this unit, "bad-setting" if an essential unit file setting could not be parsed and "masked" if the unit file has been masked. Along with showing the path to the unit file, this line will also show the enablement state. Enabled commands start at boot. See the full table of possible enablement states — including the definition of "masked" — in the documentation for the is-enabled command.

The "Active:" line shows active state. The value is usually "active" or "inactive". Active could mean started, bound, plugged in, etc depending on the unit type. The unit could also be in process of changing states, reporting a state of "activating" or "deactivating". A special "failed" state is entered when the service failed in some way, such as a crash, exiting with an error code or timing out. If the failed state is entered the cause will be logged for later reference.

Many properties shown by systemctl show map directly to configuration settings of the system and service manager and its unit files. Note that the properties shown by the command are generally more low-level, normalized versions of the original configuration settings and expose runtime state in addition to configuration. For example, properties shown for service units include the service's current main process identifier as "MainPID" (which is runtime state), and time settings are always exposed as properties ending in the "...USec" suffix even if a matching configuration options end in "...Sec", because microseconds is the normalized time unit used by the system and service manager.

Example: systemctl set-property foobar.service CPUShares=777

If the specified unit appears to be inactive, the changes will be only stored on disk as described previously hence they will be effective when the unit will be started.

Note that this command allows changing multiple properties at the same time, which is preferable over setting them individually. Like with unit file configuration settings, assigning an empty list will reset the property.

By default, only target units are recursively expanded. When --all is passed, all other units are recursively expanded as well.

Options --reverse, --after, --before may be used to change what types of dependencies are shown.

This command expects either valid unit names (in which case various unit file directories are automatically searched for unit files with appropriate names), or absolute paths to unit files (in which case these files are read directly). If a specified unit file is located outside of the usual unit file directories, an additional symlink is created, linking it into the unit configuration path, thus ensuring it is found when requested by commands such as start. The file system where the linked unit files are located must be accessible when systemd is started (e.g. anything underneath /home or /var is not allowed, unless those directories are located on the root file system).

This command will print the file system operations executed. This output may be suppressed by passing --quiet.

Note that this operation creates only the symlinks suggested in the "[Install]" section of the unit files. While this command is the recommended way to manipulate the unit configuration directory, the administrator is free to make additional changes manually by placing or removing symlinks below this directory. This is particularly useful to create configurations that deviate from the suggested default installation. In this case, the administrator must make sure to invoke daemon-reload manually as necessary, in order to ensure the changes are taken into account.

Enabling units should not be confused with starting (activating) units, as done by the start command. Enabling and starting units is orthogonal: units may be enabled without being started and started without being enabled. Enabling simply hooks the unit into various suggested places (for example, so that the unit is automatically started on boot or when a particular kind of hardware is plugged in). Starting actually spawns the daemon process (in case of service units), or binds the socket (in case of socket units), and so on.

Depending on whether --system, --user, --runtime, or --global is specified, this enables the unit for the system, for the calling user only, for only this boot of the system, or for all future logins of all users. Note that in the last case, no systemd daemon configuration is reloaded.

Using enable on masked units is not supported and results in an error.

This command expects valid unit names only, it does not accept paths to unit files.

In addition to the units specified as arguments, all units are disabled that are listed in the Also= setting contained in the "[Install]" section of any of the unit files being operated on.

This command implicitly reloads the system manager configuration after completing the operation. Note that this command does not implicitly stop the units that are being disabled. If this is desired, either combine this command with the --now switch, or invoke the stop command with appropriate arguments later.

This command will print information about the file system operations (symlink removals) executed. This output may be suppressed by passing --quiet.

This command honors --system, --user, --runtime and --global in a similar way as enable.

Use --preset-mode= to control whether units shall be enabled and disabled, or only enabled, or only disabled.

If the unit carries no install information, it will be silently ignored by this command. UNIT must be the real unit name, any alias names are ignored silently.

For more information on the preset policy format, see systemd.preset(5). For more information on the concept of presets, please consult the Preset[1] document.

Use --preset-mode= to control whether units shall be enabled and disabled, or only enabled, or only disabled.

Table 1.  is-enabled output

Effectively, this command may be used to undo all changes made with systemctl edit, systemctl set-property and systemctl mask and puts the original unit file with its settings back in effect.

This command honors --system, --user, --runtime and --global in a way similar to enable.

Depending on whether --system (the default), --user, or --global is specified, this command creates a drop-in file for each unit either for the system, for the calling user, or for all futures logins of all users. Then, the editor (see the "Environment" section below) is invoked on temporary files which will be written to the real location if the editor exits successfully.

If --full is specified, this will copy the original units instead of creating drop-in files.

If --force is specified and any units do not already exist, new unit files will be opened for editing.

If --runtime is specified, the changes will be made temporarily in /run and they will be lost on the next reboot.

If the temporary file is empty upon exit, the modification of the related unit is canceled.

After the units have been edited, systemd configuration is reloaded (in a way that is equivalent to daemon-reload).

Note that this command cannot be used to remotely edit units and that you cannot temporarily edit units which are in /etc, since they take precedence over /run.

When combined with --after or --before the list is augmented with information on which other job each job is waiting for, and which other jobs are waiting for it, see above.

This command should not be confused with the reload command.

Table 2. is-system-running output

If combined with --force, shutdown of all running services is skipped, however all processes are killed and all file systems are unmounted or mounted read-only, immediately followed by the system halt. If --force is specified twice, the operation is immediately executed without terminating any processes or unmounting any file systems. This may result in data loss. Note that when --force is specified twice the halt operation is executed by systemctl itself, and the system manager is not contacted. This means the command should succeed even when the system manager has crashed.

If combined with --force, shutdown of all running services is skipped, however all processes are killed and all file systems are unmounted or mounted read-only, immediately followed by the powering off. If --force is specified twice, the operation is immediately executed without terminating any processes or unmounting any file systems. This may result in data loss. Note that when --force is specified twice the power-off operation is executed by systemctl itself, and the system manager is not contacted. This means the command should succeed even when the system manager has crashed.

If combined with --force, shutdown of all running services is skipped, however all processes are killed and all file systems are unmounted or mounted read-only, immediately followed by the reboot. If --force is specified twice, the operation is immediately executed without terminating any processes or unmounting any file systems. This may result in data loss. Note that when --force is specified twice the reboot operation is executed by systemctl itself, and the system manager is not contacted. This means the command should succeed even when the system manager has crashed.

If the optional argument arg is given, it will be passed as the optional argument to the reboot(2) system call. The value is architecture and firmware specific. As an example, "recovery" might be used to trigger system recovery, and "fota" might be used to trigger a “firmware over the air” update.

If combined with --force, shutdown of all running services is skipped, however all processes are killed and all file systems are unmounted or mounted read-only, immediately followed by the reboot.

The service manager will exit with the specified exit code, if EXIT_CODE is passed.

# systemctl start sshd

# systemctl start sshd.service

# systemctl isolate default

# systemctl isolate default.target

# systemctl status /dev/sda
# systemctl status /home

# systemctl status dev-sda.device
# systemctl status home.mount

# systemctl stop sshd@*.service

# systemctl enable foo.service

# systemctl link /path/to/foo.service