[owyn]

This looks neat. I have to look up the very fiddly and unintuitive systemd commands all the time. service start? service.foo start? start foo.service? Oh right, sudo systemctl start service.foo

And the feedback is so bad. It should know everything in its own config dir and tell me how to do what I want to do. Was it enabled? I forget. How do I look at logs? Oh right journalctl. Also the layout of things with lots of symlinks and weird directories in places that annoy my 90's linux sysadmin brain. Why am I looking at /lib/systemd/system

I am annoyed by the redundant "systemd/system" directory name every time I have to go there. At this point, just promote it to /etc/systemd and build a better CLI.

As a very occasional linux sysadmin just trying to make things work, the "typing at a console" systemd interfaces are not fun to work with. Maybe nobody should be doing that. In an enterprise, sure that's different. I think interfaces should be human, and linux should still be fun.

[pkkm]

> I have to look up the very fiddly and unintuitive systemd commands all the time. service start? service.foo start? start foo.service? Oh right, sudo systemctl start service.foo

I don't get this complaint. It's the same order as almost every other command-line utility that has subcommands: <command> <subcommand> <thing to operate on>. To me, that kind of consistency is very intuitive.

    systemctl stop my-service
    systemctl status my-service
    git add my-file
    git remote remove upstream
    apt install my-package
    docker run my-container
    adb push local-file remote-file

[godelski]

I feel the same way. The big part for me is that it tells us that owyn doesn't use tab completion if they're forgetting about the ".service" part. Sure, I don't remember either, I don't have to.

I'll add the abstraction for anyone confused

  program [command [subcommand]] [flags] [object]
  e.g.s
  systemctl status sshd.service
  systemctl enable --now sshd.service
  touch -c test.sh
  echo 'Hello World'
  echo "Hello ${USER}"
  

Anything in brackets is optional and might not appear or be available. By command I mean a category of commands. Such as 'pip install' vs 'pip uninstall', which are sub-programs inside the main program. But this can have layers such as 'uv pip install'. Often flags can be used in any order because you'll just loop over all the arguments but this is still the standard order.

There's also the two actor pattern

  program [command [subcommand]] [flags] source destination
  e.g.s
  cp /foo/bar/baz.txt "${HOME%/}/"
  scp -i "${HOME}/.ssh/foo" ${HOME}/to_upload.sh user@remote:~/
  dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/diskToDestroy
  rsync /mnt/hdd1/ /mnt/hdd2/

[Macha]

Also the `.service` part is optional anyway for most commands (including the start, stop, restart etc. ones they use in their examples). Only commands that can operate on services and other non-service units require it.

[IgorPartola]

When it comes to starting and stopping services I want the verb to go last. Way easier to press up, backspace backspace backspace o p to change service ssh start to service ssh top. This is a frequent pattern I follow as I start/stop/restart/reload. Having to go back at least one word adds keystrokes that aren’t necessary.

[johnchristopher]

Do you use your space bar to handle heating ?

[IgorPartola]

What do you mean?

[johnchristopher]

It's a reference to an XKCD comic https://xkcd.com/1172/ that pokes fun at users with strong attachments to some software behaviours and/or interfaces.

Also, it looks like you are one of today's lucky 10,000 ! https://xkcd.com/1053/

[IgorPartola]

Haha excellent! Thank you!

[brontitall]

Doing it the way it does allows specifying multiple services.

systemctl status myapp mydb

[IgorPartola]

I would rather do that as two commands than to scroll to see the output of each.

[okanat]

There is no output for success.

[BikiniPrince]

Only failure is rewarded!

[egberts1]

NOBODY ask for a status of two services.

Hence the verb-last CLI rulez!

[autoexec]

Why not allow for both and accept the option at any location?

Something like:

systemctl --stop myapp mydb

systemctl myapp mydb --stop

[Ayesh]

All `--` strings should be "options". Starting/stopping a service is not an option, it's a command. I don't enjoy `pacman` for this very reason.

[bronson]

unnecessary flexibility brings unnecessary bugs

[kjellsbells]

I agree, but here's a handy Bashism:

^art^op

Converts the "start" in "foo start bar" to "stop", ie runs "foo stop bar". Append :p to do the substitution but print the command instead of running it.

[IgorPartola]

Learn something new every day. What is the ^ representing in this case?

[kjellsbells]

Caret is a word designator in bash's history scheme. Here it acts as a way to mark the thing with the thing being replaced. There's a more detailed explanation in [1] and a quick read in [2]. Essentially bash let's you do manipulation and re-execution of commands from your history and one of the manipulations is via word substitution.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Word-Desi...

[2] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2022/10/21/shell-replace-word...

[gf000]

Press alt+B twice?

[smallmancontrov]

Alt + Bikeshed?

(Kidding aside, quick reminder that on Mac you have to enable Settings>Profiles>Keyboard>Use Option as Meta key, or else Alt doesn't work)

[emmelaich]

It actually should be possible to switch them around. No-ones going to call their service 'stop' or 'service' right?

[Ayesh]

Someone should create a set of systemd units that show something funny when entered, like how `sl` does for `ls`.

[noumuon]

Just use an alias. I don't understand why a problem with such a simple solution should cause such issues.

[zbentley]

Because I switch computers (often, for work), and what's muscle memory on one then becomes "command not found" on others without the alias. Many of those computers I don't control and can't say "well, everyone should just run my aliases".

Because I have to share commands with other people who are troubleshooting their own systems, and copy/paste from history becomes useless if I have specific aliases.

Because someday I or someone will want to script these interactions, and aliases are not available in subprocesses.

[lee_ars]

People are telling you why. You're just choosing to disregard their answers as insufficient. This is not a them-problem. It's a you-problem.

[Ayesh]

I think the previous post mentions the `service` command, which has `service foo start` pattern.

I'm used to `service` command, so I have muscle memory which `systemd` breaks. The way `systemd` commands are laid out is better, it just messes with `service` command muscle memory.

[cassianoleal]

I disagree that the way systemd is laid out is better.

With initV, issuing many command in sequence to the same service (enable, then start… stop then start… etc) is much quicker and easier as it’s “up-arrow, control-W, type new command. With the systemd option I either need to navigate one word to the left (or more depending on how the shell is configured wrt word separation) before I replace the command, or I need to delete both the command and the service name, and retype more.

It’s not a huge difference but small downgrades in ergonomics add up over time.

[egberts1]

A huge typing pain.

A backward step in intuitive CLI usage.

We can be such a fuddy-duddy gray-beards.

[noumuon]

Aliases

[ecef9-8c0f-4374]

duct tape

[BenjiWiebe]

Systemd does have 'restart' and 'enable --now' (which starts the service too).

Too bad it doesn't have a '--status 2' flag to show the status after two seconds too.

[dralley]

The systemd layout allows you to send the same command to multiple services, which is much more frequently useful than sending multiple commands to one service.

[cassianoleal]

I can't remember the last time I had to send the same command to multiple services/units.

Normally when I'm doing things on the terminal, I do one thing at a time.

[Mayzie]

It's been a decade at this point since the last big distro (and surrounding drama), Debian and Ubuntu following shortly after, moved to systemd.

[kijin]

Many distros still provide the `service` command, and don't print any warnings when you use it. At best, you might get an informational message that the equivalent systemd command is being called. There is no recommendation to call the systemd command directly, or any sign of the `service` command being deprecated any time soon. As a result, a lot of people are probably still relying on their muscle memory for the `service` command.

[gymbeaux]

I on the other hand DO get this complaint. It’s less about the “word order” and more remembering the words to type. As a software engineer I have to google stuff all the time. I haven’t touched C#’s PLINQ in five years, I doubt I could do it from memory. Likewise, I can count on one hand the number of times I will set up a systemd service in a given year.

Many (most?) of us are all over the place, expected to “wear many hats” and aren’t in a single IDE or language all day every day. Certainly if I were a “Linux admin” I would have systemd pretty committed to memory. Anyone else probably wouldn’t.

[kstrauser]

For me:

* /etc/init.d/my-service stop

and Ubuntu’s:

* service my-service stop

both lurk in my brain.

[pkkm]

Sure, it's different from the old way, but I don't think "unintuitive" is the right word for that. systemd forced people to change their habits so that it could be more intuitive. Of course, people are going to disagree about whether it was worth it - it's the age-old question about breaking backwards compatibility for the sake of minor improvement. Personally, I got used to it pretty quickly and I like it more than the old commands now.

[ndom91]

The way I remember this is that the old way didn't allow for applying the verb to multiple units. Now you can "restart" multiple units, i.e. `systemctl restart nginx webapp`, etc.

[kstrauser]

Thanks. I'm going to use that to remember it now.

[kstrauser]

Yeah, I gave up resisting and I’m rolling with it. Ok, fine, this is the way now.

And yet my fingers still want to type it the other way.

[b112]

Yet, the "ease" of use is a joke. Every try to stop and start a service at different points? At points you choose? Have fun!

Ah well, it's all been said before.

[ripitout]

Plus, you could always write a quick shell script to swap the arguments if it detects this specific failure. Inability to remember or learn which commands expect which arguments is, at some point, not the responsibility of the software to fix. Unfortunately, this field does necessitate some amount of memorization and ability to problem-solve.

[OlympusMonds]

If I had to guess it's because of the 'service' command, which goes 'service foo start'.

It took me ages to unlearn that pattern for using systemctl, even though as you say: it's far more consistent

[frizlab]

It’s because service was the other way around, I’m sure.

[DHowett]

systemd services are named "foo.service", and you do not need to specify the ".service" in almost any case.

[tremon]

They're referring to Debian's service(8) command.

  NAME
       service - run a System V init script
  SYNOPSIS
       service SCRIPT COMMAND [OPTIONS]

(the manpage wasn't updated, but the same command also supports systemd services nowadays)

[ecef9-8c0f-4374]

sudo service my-service start

sudo service my-service stop

[zamadatix]

My biggest annoyance is "systemctl status" gives you just enough of the service's log to make the output take up most of the terminal each time you run it but never enough of the service's log to get a useful picture of what's actually happened with the service lately.

Not to mention unless the problem with the service completely prevented it from running (it advises some commands to run in that case) you're supposed to just always remember "journalctl -xeu $SERVICE" was the incantation, less you want to go look up the flags again or manually parse the entire "journalctl" output.

Overall I generally like systemd though. The syntax can just be a burden sometimes.

[kristopolous]

it's the same mentality that brought us the git design - the easiest, least typing options are rarely, if ever the thing you want to do.

Instead, these invocations give cryptic messages, throw errors, or sometimes, even break things.

The most common and helpful things are hidden deep behind multiple flags and command line arguments in manuals that read like dictionaries more than guides.

I'm always at a complete loss as to how such decisions are made. For instance, "git branch -vv" is the useful output you would like to see, every time, that should be "git branch". Why not make the current output, "git branch -qq"? Is a humane interface too much to ask for? Apparently...

I know people defend this stuff, but as a senior engineer in programming pits for 30 years, they're wrong. Needless mistakes and confusions are the norm. We can do better.

We need to stop conflating elitism with fucked up design.

[godelski]

  > Why not make the current output, "git branch -qq"? Is a humane interface too much to ask for? Apparently...

Yes, it is too much.

You have the wrong mentality, and I hope this can help make your life easier. Programs are made so that the simplest option is the base option. This is because there is a high expectation that things will be scripted AND understanding that there is a wide breadth of user preference. There's an important rule

  DON'T TRY TO MAKE A ONE SIZE FITS ALL PROGRAM

Customization is at the root of everything. We have aliases that solve most of the problems and small functions for everything else. You default to an non-noisy output, showing only __essentials__ and nothing more unless asked. Similarly, you do no filtering other than hidden files. This way, everyone can get what they want. Btw, this is why so many people are upset with default options on things like fdfind and ripgrep.

For your problem with git, there are 2 solutions you have.

  # alias git branch using git
  git config --global alias.branch 'branch -vv'

  # write a simple function and add to .bashrc or .zshrc or .*rc
  git() {
      case "$1" in
          branch)
              shift
              command git branch -vv "$@"
              ;;
          *)
              command git "$@"
              ;;
      esac
  }

  > We need to stop conflating elitism with fucked up design.

The design isn't fucked up, it is that you don't understand the model. This is okay. You aren't going to learn it unless you read docs or books on linux. If you learn the normal way, by usage, then it is really confusing at first. But there is a method to the madness. Things will start making more sense if you understand the reason for the design choices. (In a sibling comment I wrote the abstraction to command patterns that makes the gp's confusion odd. Because systemd follows the standard)

Side note: if you try to design something that works for everyone or works for the average person, you end up designing something that is BAD for most people. This is because people's preference is not uniformly distributed, meaning the average person is not representative of any person in the distribution. This is because anything that is normally distributed has its density along the shell while a uniform distribution has a uniform density all throughout it.

[kristopolous]

You're fundamentally misunderstanding things.

If every person has the same point of confusion than they are not the problem, it's the thing they're confused by.

There's better ways to do things and calling people naive for suggesting the obvious is the problem.

And about your side note: no. For example, when people checkout a branch, they want to track the remote branch 99.9% of the time. It should be the default.

The default journalctl should show where things have failed, that's why people are invoking it.

Also there's plenty of counterexamples that do these things. "ping host" genuinely pings the host. "ssh host" genuinely ssh's into the host.

You don't need to specify say, the encryption algorithm, that you want a shell, use say, "--resolve=dns" to specify the hostname resolution... It has sensible defaults that do what most people intend.

Under the model you advocate for "ssh host" would simply open up a random socket connection and then you'd have to manually attach a virtual terminal to it and request the invocation of shell separately, stacking each piece on top of the other, before you log in.

This design could be defended in the same way: Some people do port mapping, tunneling, SOCKS proxies, there's too many use cases! How can we assume the user wants a shell? Answer: because they do.

Most things are reasonable like certbot, apt, tune2fs, mkfs, awk, cut, paste, grep, sort, so many reasonable things. Even emacs is reasonable.

But systemd and git are not and the users are not the problems. Choices were made to be hostile to usability and they continue to be defended by being hostile to usability. Things like lex and yacc are inherently complicated and there's nothing to do there. Other things are intentionally complicated. Those can be fixed.

[godelski]

  > The default journalctl should show where things have failed

How? What do you filter for? Emergency? Critical? Error? Alert? (see `dmesg -l`). What's the default? Do you do since boot? Since a certain time? Since restart?

FWIW, I invoke it all the time for other reasons. I am legitimately checking the status. Is it online? Do I have it enabled? What's the PID? Where's the file (though I can run `sudo systemctl edit foo.service`)? What's the memory usage? When did it start? And so on. The tail of the log are useful but not the point of status.

If I'm looking to debug a service I look at the journal instead. I hope this helps

  # Show 10 most recent logs (you don't know what service to debug)
  journalctl -r -n 10
  # Show recent logs for a known service (can tab complete)
  journalctl -r -n 10 --unit foo.service
  # Some useful flags
  -S, -U
    Since and until. Time filtering including keywords {now, yesterday, today, tomorrow}
  -b
    Since boot. You can even do since a specific boot! Or even `--boot=-1` for the last 2 boots
  -p, --priority
    You can use the numbers 0-7 representing {emerg,alert,crit,err,warning,notice,info,debug} respectively
  -g, --grep
    No comment needed 
  -f, --follow
    This is the tool while debugging since it'll update.
  -e, --pager-end
    Start at the end of the pager 

  > that's why people are invoking it.

That's why __you're__ using it, but don't assume that your usecase is the general. Remember, linux has a large breadth in types of users. But their biggest market is still servers and embedded systems. There's far more of those than PC users.

  > Choices were made to be hostile to usability and they continue to be defended by being hostile to usability.

Idk, when systemd became the main thing I hated it too. But mostly because it was different and I didn't know how to use it. But then I learned and you know what? I agreed. This took awhile though and I had to see the problems they are solving. Otherwise it looks really bloaty and confusing. Like why have things like nspawn? Why use systemd jobs instead of using cron? Why use systemd-homed instead of useradd?

Well a big part of it is security and flexibility.

I write systemd services now instead of cron jobs. With a cron job I can't make private tmps[0]. Cron won't run a job if the computer is off during the job time. Cron can't stagger services. Cron can't wait for other services first. Cron can't be given limited CPU, memory, or other resource limitations.

Nspawn exists to make things highly portable. Chroot on steroids is used for a reason. Being able to containerize things, placing specific capabilities and all that. This is all part of a systemd job anyways. It really makes it a lot easier to give a job the minimum privileges. So often nspawn is a better fit than things like docker.

Same goes for homed. You can do things like setting timezones unique to users. But there's so much more like how it can better handle encryption. And you can do really cool things like move your home directory from one machine to another. This might seem like a non-issue to most people but it isn't. That whole paradigm where your keyboard is just an interface to a machine (i.e. a terminal, and I don't mean the cli. There's a reason that's called a terminal "emulator"). This is a really useful thing when you work on servers.

Look, there's a reason the distros switched over. It's not collective madness.

[0] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-...

https://systemd.io/

[kristopolous]

I'm not assuming I'm the default. I've worked countless jobs where I'm the "linux guy". These are the most common points of failure for everyone.

You have yet again showed how you are one of the 0.1%.

Why should the defaults be to accommodate for you?

I've been using linux for over 30 years. I'm in that group photo on the Debian.org homepage, given Linux conference talks spanning decades...

I know I'm in a very small minority and don't expect everyone to be me.

I work a support shift at a cloud hosting company and constantly deal with our customers struggling with linux on the same pain points over and over and over again. We have a bunch of auto-replies to explain things because everyone trips over the same broken sidewalk and people insist it's not broken but instead, it's beautiful design. Alright, whatever. Keeps me employed. Cool.

This is the same problem that mathematics has. Elite mathematicians insist that they should give zero shits about trying to explain things and their convoluted impenetrable explanations are elegant - it's an ultra-exclusive nerd club and most people aren't invited regardless of their interest.

Making things more approachable is somehow, cognitively unavailable to them or against some deeply held constitution. Whatever it is, it's not happening.

Some people think iOS is successful and some people think Mobian should be. I try to understand the first group and not insist everyone be in the second.

[LinXitoW]

I've heard this reasoning multiple times, but that doesn't make it right. Like you said, you ARE presuming something: That scripting and a (useless) base case are the most common usage.

How many people script Git? More importantly, how often do you change that script? Rarely, and rarely. That means it's FAR FAR less work for the scripter to look up the weird incantations to remove the "human" parts (like a quiet flag).

Conversely, the human is far more likely to write git commands impromptu, and I dare say, this is the FAR FAR more common use case.

That means Git (and a lot of these kinds of commands) optimize for the RARE choice that happens infrequently over the common case that happens often. That's horrible design.

TL;DR: Just because there's a consistent design philosophy behind obtuse linux commands does not make a good, helpful, useful, modern, or simple philosophy. If a library author wrote code this way, we'd all realize how horrible that design is.

[godelski]

  > That scripting and a (useless) base case are the most common usage.

You're thinking as a user. I'm sorry, but the vast majority of linux systems are still servers and embedded systems.

Here's two versions of the Unix Philosophy

    - Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
    - Write programs to work together.
    - Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

    - Make it easy to write, test, and run programs.
    - Interactive use instead of batch processing.
    - Economy and elegance of design due to size constraints ("salvation through suffering").
    - Self-supporting system: all Unix software is maintained under Unix.

Yes, scripting is a common use case (I use git in scripts! I use git in programs. You probably do too, even if you don't know it). Piping is a common use case. And I'm not sure what we're talking about that is "useless". I've yet to run into a command where the default is useless. Even though I have `alias grep='grep --color=always --no-messages --binary-files=without-match'` I still frequently run `\grep`.

But we're also talking about programs that are DECADES old. git will turn 20 this year. You're going to be breaking a lot of stuff if you change it now.

And look, you don't have to agree, that's fine. But I'm trying to help you get into a mindset so that this doesn't look like a bunch of gobbledegook. You call these weird incantations. I get it. But if you get this model and get why things are the way they are, then those incantations become a lot less weird and a lot easier to remember. Because frankly, you'll have to remember far less. And either way, it's not like you're going to get linux changed. If you don't use it, great, move on. But if you do, then I'm trying to help, because if you can't change it you got to figure out the way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

[troupo]

> Here's two versions of the Unix Philosophy

Man, we're talking about git. It has never subscribed to this philosophy (and most programs in *nix don't)

Git does about fifteen thousand different things with about fifteen million flags.

And it was never designed. It was thrown together as a kitchen sink of useful things with commands adding new and crazy incantations as new things were added.

"Just write this script to do the useful thing" is a weird hill to die on

[noumuon]

Why are you assuming that your use case is the most common?

[nativeit]

Fully this. For all its foibles, Linux was built to never presume too much, and its users tend to be power users who will almost certainly have dotfiles to tune their systems to their needs. In the context of making choices that will necessarily be universal, I admire how thoughtfully most standard Linux packages have been designed to never interfere with the users’ intentions.

[kristopolous]

Making things customizable doesn't mean the defaults should be useless. zsh, tmux, emacs, vim and bash, out of the box, for instance, have both pretty nice defaults and are highly customizable.

I know it's hard to make things like this but let's do it anyway.

[noumuon]

Sounds like entitlement. Ever consider there are more users than yourself?

[godelski]

And to all the linux noobies[0], you'll be a hell of a lot more efficient if you learn the philosophy of the design early. It will make it so that you can learn a new command and instantly know how to use several options. It will dramatically reduce the number of things you have to learn. I also HIGHLY suggest learning a bit of bash scripting.

Take a look at the manual

  https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/index.html

and bookmark "Bash Pitfalls"

  https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls

Live in the terminal as much as you can. It is harder at first, but you will get huge boosts in productivity quicker than you would know it (easily <2 weeks). It sucks doing things "the hard way" but sometimes that comes with extra lessons. The thing is, those extra lessons are the real value.

[0] no matter how many years you've been using it there's no shame in being a noobie

[viraptor]

None of those problems are unsolvable. The basic idea is: your terminal and script can get two different outputs. Git can already do that with colours, so it can also use more verbose for basic commands.

The other part is - scripts can use longer options while the console commands should be optimised for typing.

This has nothing to do with understanding the model or model itself. Complex things can have good interfaces - those just require good interface design and git did not get much of that.

[godelski]

  > Git can already do that with colours, so it can also use more verbose for basic commands.

You already answered your own question. There's plenty of terminals that don't support colors. Plenty that don't support 16 bit colors. Do a grep into a curl and you'll find some fun shenanigans.

  > This has nothing to do with understanding the model or model itself.

You're right. This has to do with you thinking your usecase is the best or most common.

As stated before, there is no average user[0]. So the intent is that you have the command that can be built upon. Is everyone unhappy with the base command? Probably. But is is always easier to build up than to tear down.

[0] Again, linux servers and linux embedded devices significantly out number users. Each of them do. So even if there were an average user, guess what, it wouldn't be you.

[viraptor]

> There's plenty of terminals that don't support colors.

Colour support is irrelevant to this case. They can check isatty() and give different output depending on that.

And verbose information is better in average case, if it's well formatted. Unless you're flooding the screen with useless data of course, but that's not what's being talked about here.

[Denvercoder9]

In case you don't know, you can use the `-n` argument to `systemctl status` to tweak the log output, e.g. `-n0` to disable the log output and `-n40` to get more than the default 10 lines.

[zamadatix]

That's a great option to tweak the behavior and I hadn't known about it (or if I ever had, I'd well forgotten). Thanks!

From the man page it ?looks like? if you want reverse or full then it's still off to the journalctl command and arguments but at least "-n9999" is better than "always 10 lines".

[godelski]

FWIW, I don't want that behavior. 10 lines is great for my usage.

And IIRC you can change the default behavior. In the worst case, just alias it if it is bothering you that much.

[zamadatix]

Glad you like it! I'd rather learn to deal/work with the rough spots than stick my head in the sand with an alias and be even more lost when I don't have it or am working with someone else though. At least for the super common tools like git, systemctl, grep, and the like.

[godelski]

  > I'd rather learn to deal/work with the rough spots than stick my head in the sand with an alias 

I highly encourage you to learn the commands. But it seems like you did.

I would not call something so stylistic as `git branch -vv` as "sticking your head in the sand". Your fallback is not going to really confuse you or put you at risk of not knowing what's going on. I can totally understand if we were talking about aliasing something much more complicated, but at that point it's a script...

[kai-tub]

Nice! I didn't know that was an option. Definitely something I should make configurable in `isd` :+1:

[crabbone]

In my experience, most of the times a service fails, it fails on startup (misconfiguration, missing resources). So the status is OK. Also, you can always request more lines, if you think that's helpful.

This wouldn't be my problem with systemd. Not by a long shot.

[SJC_Hacker]

> My biggest annoyance is "systemctl status" gives you just enough of the service's log to make the output take up most of the terminal each time you run it but never enough of the service's log to get a useful picture of what's actually happened with the service lately.

How about

systemctl status foo | tail

[Denvercoder9]

> I am annoyed by the redundant "systemd/system" directory name

It's not redundant, you also have /etc/systemd/user (and /lib/systemd/user) where units that run in the user context (as opposed to system-wide context) are stored.

[godelski]

It's also worth noting that this is a fairly standard pattern in /etc

  /
  | etc
  | | fail2ban
  | | | action.d
  | | | fail2band.d
  | | | filter.d
  | | | jail.d
  | | ssh
  | | | ssh_config
  | | | sshd_config
  | | systemd
  | | | network   # network wide context
  | | | nspawn    # containers
  | | | system    # system wide context
  | | | user      # user wide context
  

Personally I like it more than

  /
  | etc
  | | cron.d
  | | cron.daily
  | | cron.hourly
  | | cron.monthly
  | | cron.weekly
  | | ...
  | | firewall
  | | firewalld

Keeps things less cluttered. Hierarchical categorization is >> than lateral

[cyberax]

It could have been named 'global' instead of 'system'.

[greenavocado]

This is why I have instated a policy of using systemd --user services whenever possible.

If you don't need elevated permissions this is ideal.

All you have to do is enable linger using loginctl if you want your service to auto start as the user on boot unattended.

Your user services live in ~/.config/systemd/user

[j16sdiz]

I tried, but found it very confusing around the user session. Apparently an environment variable need to point to a started dbus. I can't get consistent results over local session vs ssh vs su vs sudo

[greenavocado]

What are you trying to do with dbus?

[bityard]

I used to do this but frankly it's easier to run a system-level unit as whatever user you want and keep all the files in /etc instead of scattered around /home.

The user-level units are most useful when running an actual multi-user system. If you trust your users to not abuse them, anyway.

[rcxdude]

I find that at least systemd means that it's consistent across distros. I spent way more time looking up this kind of thing when every distro rolled their own init system.

[kai-tub]

Author here: Yeah, I agree.

It is a bit weird. On the one hand, I understand that it makes sense to have [command] [verb] [object] on a "logical" level and that viewing logs should be a separate command (`journalctl`), but it is definitely not ergonomic. Especially if you frequently have to switch between start/stop/restart.

> As a very occasional linux sysadmin just trying to make things work, the "typing at a console" systemd interfaces are not fun to work with. Maybe nobody should be doing that. In an enterprise, sure that's different. I think interfaces should be human, and linux should still be fun.

This was precisely the case for me. I "enjoy" playing around with systemd and am super interested in better understanding it, but the feedback loop just felt sooo slow. So hopefully this TUI can make it "fun" again :)

[BenjiWiebe]

When I'm really working with a service and get tired of typing sudo systemctl restart or status all the time, I'll just do a quick alias or two right then and there.

alias s=sudo systemctl status alias r=sudo systemctl restart

And if I'm only working with one service, I'll throw the service name in there too.

[kjkjadksj]

It is a bit crazy to me how everyone says “dont use cron systemd is in now” but cron just does what it says on the tin with no problems. I have lines that work fine ran in script or on my crontab but when wrapped in a launchd command no longer work (log says things work until the db is to be updated which tells me launchd ran processes lack sufficient permissions perhaps to update my db but its not clear why this is the case or how I can elevate launchd sufficiently.

[MrDrMcCoy]

> cron just does what it says on the tin with no problems.

I can name a rather large problem with cron that systemd timers solve handily: long-running job duplication. When jobs take longer to run than the space between their triggering times, duplicates start piling up. I've had to rescue numerous systems from such states, which are difficult to detect until things have gotten quite bad. Sure, you can write a bunch of boilerplate to handle this yourself with cron, but with systemd timers it's all handled for you along with other niceties like capturing all output in journald and ensuring that the next run starts at soon as possible.

[viraptor]

Launchd is not used in systemd - why would anything be wrapped in it? The config is simple - User for the user and Group for the group. You can print it the result of "id" if you're not sure what the result is.

[kjkjadksj]

Sorry I conflate the two since they share a lot of similarity. Launchd is what I use as its a macos system.

[simoncion]

> ...cron just does what it says on the tin with no problems.

Yeah, tell me about it.

We had a production-down support ticket filed for one of the things that I work on at $DAYJOB. The customer's VM's disk was full. Why? Because the 'timer unit' that was supposed to run logrotate every day had never been run and was never scheduled to run. (The VM had been up for a month at this point.) No other customers had ever reported this issue, and we'd not changed anything about that timer unit or what it is supposed to run in ages.

No amount of gyration or agitation with 'systemctl' and friends OR rebooting of the VM kicked the cron replacement into proper functioning. 'logrotate' was simply never being scheduled to run. This fucker was WEDGED, and the tools weren't helping us understand why.

We read through all the docs on all the various kinds of units and don't see what we're doing wrong. We do a BUNCH of digging, and find an -IIRC- open Github issue from years back where someone was running into this problem. More or less the last word on the issue was Poettering saying something like "Well... actually, now that we've said that that particular cascade of options isn't actually supposed to work, now I'm not so sure that they're NOT supposed to work.". And that was -apparently- that.

IMO, when your cron replacement can be easily configured in such a way as to never even try to run the thing that you scheduled it to run, you really need to go back and rethink how you've built your cron replacement.

[teddyh]

Considering how many things of questionable veracity are said about systemd in general, and Lennart in particular, I would like a link to that issue before I take your characterization at face value.

[glandium]

At least systemctl status tells you when next the timer will trigger. Cron doesn't.

[isodude]

Actually it does, have a look at cronnext

[glandium]

First time I hear about it. And it's not surprising, because it's not in cron. It's in cronie, and was "only" added in 2016.

[isodude]

I only found out last week!

Was not aware that vixie cron was first released 1987(https://github.com/vixie/cron/blob/master/Documentation/Chan... 1.md), and still has fresh commits.

[noumuon]

Fiddly and unintuitive? A lack of exposure to something does not really allow room for valid criticism of the thing.

Just a tip, if you remember the service name, status will show the directory the unit file is in. That will hopefully get you over your issues with directories. Complaining about Linux directories seems weird though. Have you looked at... anything else at all?

[PhilipRoman]

I just wish systemd allowed abbreviations for the subcommands, like "ip" (and git, for long options).

[SoftTalker]

By the time you have it all memorized, they'll change it. Again. Because... because.

[mixmastamyk]

I haven’t had much trouble with the cli, but it is kinda wordy. I made this alias:

    alias sc='sudo systemctl'

Now it matches the sc utility introduced in Windows many years back. Then remember the verb goes first.

[johnisgood]

Yeah, and you can omit the ".service" suffix, and you could use ".timer" suffix, too, if you have a timer for that service.

As much as I do not like systemd, I do not think its commands are an issue, and I use "systemctl status" and "journalctl" as well with some flags at times.

[robinsonb5]

"systemctl" would be less of an issue if "sysctl" didn't already exist and do something completely different.

[johnisgood]

Yes, it is something I had to learn in the very beginning, but I never made the mistake ever again.

[BrouteMinou]

I am going to be that guy, but I went full runit for similar reasons.

Give me files for my logs, give me a single place for my service definitions, be simple.

After years of systemd, I have never really "got it", while it took a weekend for runit.

It's not always our choice, corporate world is something else, I know...