[systemd-devel] The behavious of systemctl [from fedora-devel]

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 20.06.11 09:09, Aaron Sowry (aaron+rh at aeneby.se) wrote:

> Hello,

Heya,

> I've been wanting to discuss the default behaviour of systemctl, which I began
> doing on fedora-devel (see [1] for start of thread) before it was pointed out
> that systemd-devel is probably a more appropriate place for
> discussion.

systemd-devel is definitely the more appropriate forum, however, I will
respond with the same as I did on fedora-devel ;-)
> 
> For those who can't be bothered reading through the original thread, I'll try to
> summarise:
> 
> systemctl implements a lot of default behaviours which differ depending on
> whether the output is tty or not. These include:
> 
> - Automatically forking a pager and piping output to it if the output is tty.
>   This results in a number of problems, including RH #713707 which means that
>   the user will get no output on tty if there is no supported pager available.
>   --no-pager has been provided to disable this, and $SYSTEMD_PAGER is being
>   considered[2] as a workaround for non-supported pagers.

Yes, we will support SYSTEMD_PAGER and we also will make sure that if
people remove all pagers from their system the autopaging will be turned
off automatically.

> - Column headers will be displayed on tty, but not otherwise. The assumption
>   here seems to be that output to non-tty channels is not destined for human
>   eyes. Currently, there is no way to force column headers on non-tty
>   channels.

We'll add an option for that, which people who hate this behaviour can
then use via an alias.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.