Determine if a service is really running

According to

How to read "service --status-all" results

service --status-all 

list the running services with [+]. On the other hand, you can check the status of a service with

service <name> status 

Now both commands list the service apache-htcacheclean for me

differently.

✗ ✗ sudo service apache-htcacheclean status ● apache-htcacheclean.service - Disk Cache Cleaning Daemon for Apache HTTP Server Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/apache-htcacheclean.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: inactive (dead) ✗ ✗ sudo service --status-all [+] acpid [-] alsa-utils [-] anacron [+] apache-htcacheclean [-] apache2 [+] apparmor 

Why is that, what is correct now or have I overlooked anything?

1 Answer

Solution

Translated from:

This is a very good example of why you shouldn't use the service command since systemd (and thus systemctl) was introduced.

You can look at the source code of the service command (/usr/sbin/service). With the --status-all option, this script changes to /etc/init.d and executes each executable file located there with a previously defined environment and the argument status. From this call, the return value and the output are saved.

A service receives the marker [+] if the return value of the executed program is 0 and the length of the recorded output is not zero. Before that, it is tested whether the output of the executed file contains the string usage: (upper and lower case is ignored) in order to use the marker [?] to put. For all other cases the result is [-].

Now an example:

/etc/init.d$ ls acpid console-setup.sh grub-common lvm2 mdadm-waitidle plymouth-log ssh apache2 cron hwclock.sh lvm2-lvmetad networking procps udev apache-htcacheclean cryptdisks irqbalance lvm2-lvmpolld nfs-common rpcbind ufw apparmor cryptdisks-early iscsid lxcfs open-iscsi rsync uuidd apport dbus keyboard-setup.sh lxd open-vm-tools rsyslog atd ebtables kmod mdadm plymouth screen-cleanup /etc/init.d$ ./apache-htcacheclean status * apache-htcacheclean is not running /etc/init.d$ echo $? 0 

If you ask service directly about the status of a service, it will instead be passed through a systemctl, which can then give a much more correct answer.