service (8)

Leading comments

A man page for service(8). 

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...

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man8/service.8".)

NAME

service - run a System V init script

SYNOPSIS

service SCRIPT COMMAND [OPTIONS]
service --status-all
service --help | -h | --version

DESCRIPTION

service runs a System V init script or upstart job in as predictable an environment as possible, removing most environment variables and with the current working directory set to /.
The SCRIPT parameter specifies a System V init script, located in /etc/init.d/SCRIPT, or the name of an upstart job in /etc/init. The existence of an upstart job of the same name as a script in /etc/init.d will cause the upstart job to take precedence over the init.d script. The supported values of COMMAND depend on the invoked script. service passes COMMAND and OPTIONS to the init script unmodified. For upstart jobs, start, stop, status, and reload are passed through to their upstart equivalents. Restart will call the upstart 'stop' for the job, followed immediately by the 'start', and will exit with the return code of the start command.
All scripts should support at least the start and stop commands. As a special case, if COMMAND is --full-restart, the script is run twice, first with the stop command, then with the start command. This option has no effect on upstart jobs.
service --status-all runs all init scripts, in alphabetical order, with the status command. The status is [ + ] for running services, [ - ] for stopped services and [ ? ] for services without a 'status' command. This option only calls status for sysvinit jobs; upstart jobs can be queried in a similar manner with initctl list.

EXIT CODES

service calls the init script and returns the status returned by it.

FILES

/etc/init.d

The directory containing System V init scripts.

/etc/init

The directory containing upstart jobs.

ENVIRONMENT

LANG, LANGUAGE, LC_CTYPE, LC_NUMERIC, LC_TIME, LC_COLLATE, LC_MONETARY, LC_MESSAGES, LC_PAPER, LC_NAME, LC_ADDRESS, LC_TELEPHONE, LC_MEASUREMENT, LC_IDENTIFICATION, LC_ALL, TERM

The only environment variables passed to the init scripts.

SEE ALSO

/etc/init.d/skeleton,
update-rc.d(8),
init(8),
invoke-rc.d(8).
initctl(8).